The Online Lodge

A modern job search campaign is by nature often intricate. While the internet 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 personal, extremely targeted marketing operation where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network is your source for job leads.

So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on Craigslist and got 600+ applications in a week. For a single job. That’s increased competition for jobs.

Had the right person gotten ahold of us before we ran the ad, they could have gotten the job before getting all that competition. How? By finding someone at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware of the job for at least 11 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be careful to check your application materials thoroughly before submitting them. When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily taken out with a quick triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job description. By rejecting candidates whose cover letters gave us causes not to hire 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 job hunters who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the good news is that job boards give you a sense of who is hiring, and for what kinds of positions. But once those jobs 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 checked on on the net. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some Facebook comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing insane, but enough to swing our thoughts about who to choose.

AA-Careers provides a extensive 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!