The Dart Maker Blog

A modern job search campaign is by nature often 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 search needs to be thought of as a personal, highly targeted marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network is your lead generating machine.

So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on Craigslist and got hundreds and hundreds applications in a calendar week. For a single position. That’s increased competition.

Had a suitable candidate contacted us before we placed the ad, they could have landed the job before having all that competition. How? By finding an employee at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 13 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 HR professional would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job description. By passing over 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 prospects whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over job hunters who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the good news is that job boards give you a feel of what companies are hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those jobs are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well honed 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 thing to be aware of is how quickly you can be checked out on the web. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing illegal, but enough to tilt our thinking about who to employ.

AA-Careers provides a all-inclusive 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!