Finding a Job Using the Net to Your Advantage

The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several potential challenges. It also adds many complexities, and a lot more matters to consider…and be mindful of.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personalized, extremely directed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network of contacts is your source for information.

So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on Craigslist and got over 650 applications in a calendar week. For one position. That’s increased competition for job openings.

Had a strong candidate gotten ahold of us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have secured the job prior to getting all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows someone at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 9 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your cover letter and resume carefully! When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily removed with a fast triage process. How? The same way any manager would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By rejecting prospects whose cover letters gave us causes not to hire them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating candidates whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by rejecting prospects who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the great news is that job sites give you a feel of what companies are hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well written resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.

Another potential problem to be aware of is how easily you can be checked on on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some pictures and comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing illegal, but enough to swing our thoughts about who to choose.

AA-Careers provides a broad set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.

Be careful out there, and good hunting!