When you apply for a job, say, through Monster.com, whose eyeballs do you think review your resume first? The hiring manager? Hell no.
The head of HR? Nope.
The senior recruiter? Often, nope again.
Very frequently, the ones grabbing the many, many applications off the job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, etc.) are the near-intern level HR assistants, or junior level recruiters. They're the ones who screen them first.
You want a neophyte in charge of your job future? JobJenny thinks not.
Plus, when you go this route, you jump into a huge pileup of resumes of those who are going about about the job search in this same hardly-ever-works-anymore way.
If you apply one rule, and one rule only to your job search, please please apply this one:
The one who gets to the hiring manager wins.
You got caught up in the Linkedin wave and set up a profile. Yay, you.
But what are you doing with it? Are you leveraging it big-time in your job search? Based on many, many conversations I've had with job seekers my guess is, probably not.
Sure, you may dabble with it, but are you joining groups as a killer means to network with, literally, thousands of people with similar interests, job goals and specialties?
Are you participating in forums and discussions to position yourself as an expert in your field?
Are you researching companies that interest you, and learning about the people working within that company? Reaching out to them?
You may not be using social networking as part of your job search strategy. You really should be, and we'll talk a whole bunch about why and how coming up here. But today's key point is this:
Your potential employer is. The recruiters working with them are.
Simply put, we seeeeee you. The good, the bad and the ugly.
Thus, I will offer a series of really obvious tips. If you're serious about that search:
- Remove the picture of yourself wearing an empty beer pitcher hat from your Facebook profile, ESPECIALLY if you failed to update your privacy settings a month or so ago, when Facebook "simplified" things for all of us ( http://bit.ly/dCDQXe).
- Don't, under any circumstance, tweet about how much you love beer bongs, strip clubs, pot or instigating bar fights.
Seriously. I think this can be done. How? It's simple, really, but probably also harder than it sounds because old habits die hard.
The secret to cutting at least six weeks out of your job search is to bypass the outdated, overly optimistic, passive, time-wasting stuff that everyone used to do on the front end of our searches.
Certainly, you didn't do them because you were clueless; you did them because in years past, they often worked. These methods may have even worked the very last time you were laid off, fired or simply found yourself seeking another position.
I'll bet your old (or current) search formula looked something like this:
Day 1: Old Job Ends
Day 2: Eat, drink or smoke yourself silly, convince yourself you didn't need that crummy old job anyways, make voodoo doll of former boss.
Day 3: Post resume on Monster.com and every other job board you can think of. Call a bunch of recruiters, even the ones you think suck at recruiting.
Day 4: Apply for nearly every job on Monster.com that is in your immediate geography, regardless of your fit or interest level in said job.
Day 5: Spam every company you can think of with your resume, using a cut and paste form letter.
Day 6: Wait for results.
Days 7-40: Repeat days 3-6 at least 10 times.
The problem with this approach is that, today? Almost no one lands a job after six weeks using it. So don't even waste valuable time testing my theory.
Be proactive instead.
This is an important topic that I want to hit on early because it's beyond important. And because I think that many, many job seekers don't get this:
Recruiters? We are not your agents.
We aren't sitting at our desks with a roster of favorite candidates, madly dialing up companies to find the perfect job for you. (That, my friend, is YOUR job.)
I know that can be frustrating to hear. Especially when you're in that "Oh shit, I just got canned" manic panic mode. (This, by the way, usually hits just about three days after a layoff, shortly after you've cleared out your surplus of Johnny Walker Red and Ding Dongs.)
But it's the truth, and you shall prevail if you understand how recruiters work before you waste a minute calling every one you've ever talked to.
Generally speaking, recruiting firms get hired by corporations with open positions that they're struggling to fill. Sometimes, this relationship is formed as a retained search; more often today, a contingency search.
What this means to you is this: