A man who goes fishing and puts one hook in the water has only one chance of catching any of the millions of fish in the sea, and one fish is the best he can ever do. A man with two hooks in the water has double the chances of landing a fish, and has also earned himself the opportunity to outperform the first guy by landing twice as many. The more hooks you have in the water, the better your chances of landing job interviews and job offers.
Employers prefer candidates who come to them directly or as a result of referrals, which makes networking a powerful and favored approach of job hunters everywhere. This means that your most effective approach to conducting a successful job search is to find ways to weave social networking tactics into every aspect of your search.
With tens of thousands of job sites and resume banks, you could spend an eternity noodling around without getting anything done. The danger is that this aimless noodling can be highly addictive because it feels like you are searching for job opportunities, plus it involves zero rejection. Unfortunately, the long-term results of this unfocused noodling are decreasing self-confidence and increasing depression due to lack of results. The Internet increases your ability to gather and disseminate information, but your responsibility is to understand and control this tendency, and not allow yourself to be mesmerized by a world of endless clicking. Every day of your job search, your primary goal should be to get into conversation with the people with the authority to hire you, or the people who can introduce you to them, for the high-value job titles we have discussed throughout the book.
There are so many thousands of job sites that you could never hope to visit them all, and so you start by identifying sites that are relevant to your search.
Does the site have job postings that are suitable for you? If it doesn’t, you can move on to the next site; if it does, you will want to register with the site and receive job alerts in your e-mail when new jobs matching your requested criteria get posted to the site. This way you will be notified of suitable jobs rather than wasting time searching the site for them on a regular basis.
Most job sites, except for some executive sites, are free: It’s the employers who are paying to post their job openings and to search the resume database. Consequently, job sites work with employers to develop ever-more-efficient screening tools. It’s important that you be aware of this when setting up your account and filling out a profile: the part of registration that makes you discoverable to corporate recruiters and headhunters.
Most job sites break up the registration/profile-building/resume-uploading process into a number of steps. These steps typically include providing information on topics like Target Job, Profile Summary, Skills, Work Experience, Relocation, Salary, Ideal Job, Education, etc. Not too difficult, as these are pretty much the topics you have already addressed in creating both your social media profiles and your resume.
Use the target job title you determined with your TJD (Target Job Deconstruction) exercise. If you found a number of common variations of your job title, it can help increase your discoverability to include those variations.
If a job site uses Job Objective as a category be very careful what you write, because no one is interested in what you want at this stage of the recruitment cycle, so writing about your wishes at this point only wastes space. Additionally, what you want is unlikely to be in a recruiter’s database search terms, so this won’t help your discoverability either.
Whether this section of the registration is labeled Career Summary or Job Objective, this is the place to capture your ability to deliver on the requirements of your target job. In the Knock ’em Dead approach to resume creation (Knock ’em Dead Resume Templates) and acing job interviews (Knock ’em Dead Job Interview and Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide) we talk about creating something we call a Performance Profile: three to six short sentences that reflect employer priorities for this job (as determined by the TJD process) and capture your professional capabilities in executing these priorities. This is the perfect information to increase your discoverability, because it reflects your credentials as they match employers’ skill and experience priorities for this job, plus the terms they use to describe the job.
The dialogue box for this section often has lots of space, so you can end it by inserting a header that says, “The opportunity to use these skills.” Then paste in the entire collection of professional skills that you discovered in the TJD exercise and listed on your resume and social media profiles as Professional Skills. While there is a section later in the registration for exactly this topic, putting in a full list of your professional skills here is both relevant to potential readers and doubles the amount of keywords in your profile that recruiters are likely to search for, thereby increasing your discoverability.
It is always better to give a range rather than a single figure and always easier to negotiate down rather than up. You can learn more about how to determine a realistic salary range and how to negotiate an offer in Knock ’em Dead Job Interview.
If a category of Ideal Job is available, understand that no recruiter is remotely interested in your ideal job, and all you will achieve by discussing it here is a reduction of your discoverability.
In reality, your ideal job, and the one you are most likely to land and subsequently be successful in, is the job you are doing now. As such, you write, “The opportunity to . . .” and then follow with the same information that you used in the Career Summary/Job Objective section (though worded slightly differently for readability). End with, “ . . . and the opportunity to use these skills . . .” You then finish off by listing your professional skills once again.
This will support your discoverability by matching your skills and desires with employer priorities for this job, and by repeating for the second or third time the keywords that a recruiter is likely to use, you further increase your discoverability. Test to see if there is more space by pasting in your professional skills yet again. No one will actually read the repetition (and if they did, they would regard it as a glitch), but the software will catch and reward you for it by increasing your ranking in the search results.
You can cut the information developed for your social media profiles or resume and paste it here, repeating your professional skills in the context of the jobs in which they were used.
Education is the area most prone to exaggeration and outright lies, but for that very reason educational claims can and do get checked. Untruths can cause offers to be withdrawn and jobs to be terminated. Don’t fake it.
Lack of a degree—and there are lots of valid reasons why you might not have one—bars you from contention for an increasing number of professional opportunities, but don’t throw up your hands in despair. If you are involved in the pursuit of any post-secondary degree but haven’t yet achieved it, you can still use it. Just state the school and the degree, adding a projected graduation date. This can often help you over the “lacks a degree” hurdle.
Note that you can do this as long as you are enrolled in at least one course toward that degree. Your pursuit of an education while you work is a plus in employers’ eyes, and you have a right to show it to them and to show yourself in the best light.
When completing questions about relocation, your answer is basically: “Open for the right opportunity.” This is because:
Recruiters often look for candidates who either are working for or have worked for certain companies or on certain accounts/brands. If you have worked for “name” companies and products, drop those names—in this profile, and in all your social media profiles and your resume. You can also drop corporate names and brand names if you have been a vendor, contractor, or client.
When you are asked to define the jobs that interest you, set your sights wide. You may get too many responses initially, but you can gradually narrow the parameters. It’s better to plow through a little junk than miss a great opportunity. Alternatively, you might not be getting enough responses from a particular site and may want to recast your needs in broader terms.
Whenever you respond to a job posting, do exactly as requested, but also copy the job posting and all contact information for that company to a folder on your desktop. You will need this if an interview occurs. In addition, you can cross-reference the job posting with people in your various networks and perhaps come up with a name and a high-value job title to which you can send the resume directly, or someone who might give you an introduction. Approaching the company in two different ways—and leveraging your social networking contacts in the process—doubles your chances of getting an interview.
If you choose your job sites well, you’ll collect two types of job postings: opportunities that are good for you, and opportunities that might be perfect for the high-value job titles that you target as members of your professional networks: those people one to three levels above you, holding the same title, one level below you, or who interact with your title on a regular basis.
Before you file any job postings that are suitable for you, go through them carefully, looking for keywords that describe skill sets you have that are not captured in your existing resume and social media profiles. List these new terms for skill sets you possess in a Word document; you’ll use this document to refresh your social media profiles (and your resume as it is posted in the resume banks), and in the process you will enhance your discoverability (more on this shortly).
Make a folder for each relevant site you visit, and store postings in one of the two folders—either for you or for sharing with network contacts. You’ll quickly see which sites are most productive for you.
You can leverage job sites in other ways too. Go to any job site and search its posted openings by putting in minimal keywords and restrictions. For example, if you were an insurance sales manager, you might try a simple keyword search for “insurance”; there may be hundreds of results, but the vast majority will be for insurance jobs other than the one you want. However, those results will reveal relevant recruiters and companies in your profession and target location—plus these opportunities will be perfect for your high-value networking contacts. These leads will become even more useful as we begin to leverage them using other little-known job search tactics and integrate them with social networking.
Companies all use their own websites as recruitment vehicles, and invariably have all open jobs posted there. So whenever you identify fresh companies in your target location, you should always visit their websites to see if there are suitable job openings posted there. Even if they do not have jobs for someone like you posted, you should still upload your resume. You don’t really know what is going on at that company, and at the very least you will be in their database and become more readily discoverable when a need does arise.
If a company is looking for anyone even remotely connected with your area of professional expertise, they could also be looking for someone like you. This means you should then upload your resume and capture any contact information you can find to help research the company and perhaps approach the appropriate hiring managers directly or through networked referrals.
When a job site has postings suitable for you, it means that recruiters will also be cruising that site’s resume bank for candidates. This means that you will want to upload your resume. Some considerations to bear in mind:
Reading the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide will give you additional and more detailed tactics for getting the most mileage out of your chosen job sites and resume banks. We don’t have the space in this book, and need to stay focused on leveraging your social networks. This we will continue to do in the next chapter, as we begin to look at direct research.