:Forest Folk

A modern job hunting campaign is by nature often intricate. While the web 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, highly directed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network is your inside source for information and job leads.

So where does the web fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on Craigslist and got over 650 responses in a calendar week. For a single job. That’s increased competition for jobs.

Had a suitable candidate contacted us before we placed the ad, they could have secured the job prior to getting 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 8 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your application matierials carefully! 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 HR professional would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our job. By passing over prospects whose cover letters gave us grounds not to engage them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating job hunters whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over 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 sense 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 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 quickly you can be checked out on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing insane, but enough to sway our thinking about who to choose.

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!