Cyber Poems

A modern job hunting campaign is by nature quite complicated. While the net has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and possible challenges for job hunters.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a highly personal, highly targeted marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network of contacts is your lead generating machine.

So where does the web fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job board and got 600+ applications in a calendar week. For one job. That’s increased competition for jobs.

Had a great candidiate called us before we posted the ad, they could have secured the position prior to running in to all that competition. How? By knowing an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware of the job for at least 12 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 eliminated with a speedy triage process. How? The same way any manager would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By passing over candidates whose cover letters gave us causes not to employ them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating prospects whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by eliminating candidates who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the great news is that job boards give you a feel of who is 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 thought out 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 investigated on the net. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing insane, but enough to sway our thinking about who to hire.

AA-Careers provides a encompassing 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!

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