Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personal, extremely 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 a popular job site and got over 600 applications in a week. For one opening. That’s increased job hunting competition.

Had a strong person gotten ahold of us before we ran the ad, they could have secured the position prior to having all that competition. How? By finding an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about 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 fast triage process. How? The same way any manager would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By passing over prospects whose cover letters gave us reasons not to hire them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating candidates whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by eliminating prospects who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the great news is that job boards give you a feel of who is hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still compete, 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 quickly and easily you can be checked out on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some Facebook comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to tilt our thinking about who to employ.

AA-Careers provides a broad 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!