I hear you dude, the Internet frustrates me too.

Up until a few years ago how many of us had thought about doing banking and paying bills at home on a computer rather than mailing checks in through the mail?

What about trading stocks online rather than paying a broker big commissions to do so?

Doing research for your upcoming job interview is certainly a lot easier thanks to the Internet compared to the old way i.e. going to the library and trying to find a (somewhat) new annual report of the company lying around that you could memorize a few key figures and facts from. Yeah, that’s what we used to do before the Internet.

As with anything though, you often have to take the good with the bad and the Net certainly has some negative aspects and some of them are related to job searching and career management.

It’s harder to control our privacy

Perhaps the biggest change that the Internet has brought to job searching – between personal websites, blogs, social media, etc – is that people are a lot easier to find than in the old days. Before the Net, it was relatively easy for you to maintain a low profile. These days, if you have an Internet connection, an email address, and or access to one or more social websites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s a lot harder to hide.

Even if you don’t have access to these sites, if you have a friend(s) who does and they happen to post photos with you in them, they’ll be all over the Net in no time even if you’re not aware of it.

From a job searching and recruitment perspective the more exposure people have online the harder it is for us to control our image online. It also makes it more difficult for people in the hiring industry (recruiters specifically) to help job searchers because people are a lot easier to find online already by the hiring companies.

I remember back around 2000 when the Internet was certainly well-established but most of the big social media website weren’t in existence yet. Even then I recall several major recruitment clients we dealt with saying that they didn’t want us submitting any candidate who had their resume on a particular job board because the hiring company already had access to that job board and could find that perosn themselves.

In hindsight – actually even back then – I knew this was a silly stance for the companies to take. It’s absurd to suggest that because a person is on a particular job board database that the company could have already found them. Imagine a hiring company today saying “don’t send us the resume of anyone who has a Facebook account because we can find them ourselves.”

We rely on others to do their job

In the old days before the Internet, the main advantage of a recruiter to a hiring company – and by extension to job searchers – is that they could let hiring companies know about job searchers that the company wouldn’t have otherwise know anything about and they could let job searchers know about jobs that didn’t otherwise exist.

These days, it’s hard to imagine that many adults who have an Internet connection can’t be found one way or the other through a quick Google search or through the afore-mentioned social engines either directly or indirectly through someone else.

So how is that a bad thing?

Well for starters, the Internet has made it easier for anyone to post their resume on numerous job boards and to fire off dozens or hundreds of resume to hiring managers for jobs they may or may not actually be suitable for. Of course since everyone can do this, it means that now hiring managers might get bombarded by hundreds of emails rather than the hundreds of mailed/faxed resumes that they used to get for just one job.

In the old days though, sending off 100 printed resumes by fax or mail cost a lot more to do and was more time-consuming so people tended not to apply to as many jobs. It just took a lot longer and made it more difficult to do.

I remember following university graduation spending an entire afternoon tweaking and customizing perhaps 15-20 cover letter/resume combinations and mailing them to those 15-20 companies for consideration for a specific job. These days I can email that many job applications in a matter of minutes. Whether they actually get read though is the million dollar question.

Fundamentally the Internet has made it easier and quicker for us to apply for jobs but it’s made it harder for the people receiving them to wade through them. The Internet has also made technology more important in the process since it’s incumbent upon the resume writer to include relevant keywords and phrases in their resume that a hiring manager will (hopefully) include in the keyword search that they do to find resumes for their jobs.

In my experience though, hiring managers do a so-so job at searching job board databases because if they were better than this on average, recruiters would have long since gone the way of the dodo bird and become extinct as a profession. I can think of many specific cases (to refer back to the comment I made above about candidates on job boards) where I’d present a candidate to a company and they’d tell me that they saw that person’s resume in the job board that they used….of course they didn’t actually see the person’s resume in the database until after I’d brought the candidate to their attention!

In the end I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to work with these sorts of hiring companies as they were simply asking us to make up for their incompetence and send them candidates they’d find a reason not to have to pay us for. When you rely on others, you have to make sure they are people who can actually be relied upon, right?

Does it make you wonder about the times you applied for a job you felt you were truly qualified for but never got a call from the company and couldn’t understand why?

How can you be like cream and rise to the top?

The funniest part about the Internet job boards is with the exception of the people who own and work for the job boards, most people including career experts will agree that searching the boards for jobs has about the same likelihood of getting you a job as responding to an ad in a newspaper once did. Sure, people do get jobs using these methods but the percentages are very low that you’ll rise above all the other candidates who bombard the boards with their resume for the same job(s) as you.

Instead, people tend to agree that networking – actually meeting with and speaking with people who can positively influence your job search – is the way to go to get yourself a new job. That, plus other methods like proactively contacting companies you’d like to work for whether they have an advertised job or not tend sto hield better results. My brother in law got his last job by sending an unsolicited resume directly to the president of the company that ended up hiring him. This is especially good when you have skills or experience that are in demand and when people like you don’t fall from trees.

Again, we’re talking about cream rising to the top and that’s how you do it. By not using the same methods that everyone is using.

In other words you go back to the same job search methods that tended to work the best in the old days before the Internet job boards even existed.

Rant over.

Are you a developer looking for full-time, part-time, freelance or internship position?

Are you a hiring manager looking for a developer?

I came across a new jobs website from the guys at WooThemes who I’ve used for one of my WordPress themes. Their new WooJobs website is a great place to visit if you’re looking for a WordPress or WooThemes project to work on.

I had a good look over the site and there are already a number of active jobs available so if you’re looking for a new project or job to work on, this site might be of interest.

Right now the site is free to use for job searchers and hiring managers.

Check out WooJobs to learn more.

A few days ago I posted on the subject of not posting your resume on every job board you can find.

Taking a step back, many people often wonder if they should even post their resume on an online job board(s) in the first place. Obviously at the end of the day it’s your choice but here are a few things to consider:

1. You can lose your ability to conduct a covert job search: If your resume is posted publicly so that anyone can search for it, anyone can therefore find it. How will you explain yourself if your boss or someone else in your current employer sees your resume on one of those job boards? It would cause a few question to arise I’m sure.

2. You’re going to get to know a lot of recruiters: Depending on the job board(s) you’re posting your resume to, you’ll probably find that many if not most of the people contacting you for jobs aren’t actual hiring managers but recruiters.

3. You’re probably competing with hundreds of other people: Every job that appears on the major job boards probably gets ready by hundreds (or more) other people so there’s your competition for often just 1 job. Obviously your odds at getting a job decrease as more people apply for it using the same method you do and it becomes more difficult to separate yourself from them.

How can you improve your odds of conducting a confidential job search and still get some value?

Depending on your profession, you might find that there are industry or job-specific job boards that might help to decrease the number of people applying for the same jobs you are but are also more focused to your interests too.

You can also consider either posting your resume as confidential and/or not posting your resume at all and simply setting up job agents (ie. saved searches) to alert you when a suitable job arises so that you maintain control of your resume rather than posting it publicly.

If you’ve recently applied for hundreds of jobs online and haven’t received any interviews, I guess the first thing I’d ask is how many of those jobs were you actually qualified for?

I’m guessing the number is probably 1/4 or maybe less.

I recall getting four consecutive emails from the same person who was applying for four different jobs with our company and in some cases the person didn’t qualify for any of them.

I can actually recall many cases where I saw this happen. Then I’d find out that this same person had also emailed several of my colleagues multiple times for other jobs we were working on, jobs that this person also didn’t qualify for.

This is the problem with the Internet and job boards in particular: if it’s easy for you to apply to hundreds of jobs online in a short amount of time, it’s just as easy for everyone else to do the same thing so the whole process becomes a cesspool of job applications from people who are applying for jobs they have no right to be applying for.

The other issue of course is that it then falls upon the hiring manager to figure out how they’re going to weed through the hundreds of applications and get a short list of people who actually fit the job they’re trying to fill.

If you’re applying for jobs with a company that you don’t fit but figure that there’s a chance that if they see your resume they might think of another job to interview you for that you actually fit, you’re wasting your time.

And I know that there are many people who do this because I’ve spoken with many people who use this tactic.

I can’t say with 100% certainty that this tactic never works but I’d be willing to bet money that it doesn’t. When I saw a person who had emailed me four times for four jobs they weren’t qualified for, I’d open their resume and quickly scan the first page just to see what they’d done recently and typically the next step was to delete all emails they’d sent me and move onto the next person.

The thing I noticed about people who tend to email you multiple times for different jobs that they aren’t qualified for is that they also tend to be people who aren’t particularly good at what they do. If they were, they’d be applying for the correct jobs and not wasting everyone’s time.

Maybe you’re not into New Year’s resolutions but if you are, one resolution you might consider is to clean up your resume footprint online.

Specifically, if you’ve posted your resume to numerous job boards, you should consider taking your resume off some or all of them off unless you’re actually looking for a new job.

Even if you are looking for a new job you need to keep track of what job boards you’re posting to. I’ve helped people find jobs and then 2 months later find that their resume is still posted on job boards. This doesn’t look good especially if your new employer sees your resume online and thinks that you’re searching for a new job again. I’ve seen that happen.

Often, people find a new job board and post their resume to it and then forget about it or forget their login details and don’t bother to visit the website again.

Your resume has value so protecting it and making it harder to find is actually preferable to plastering it all over the place and believing that quantity is better than quality. As many people – including some so-called career experts believe – job searching is “all about numbers” and the more places you post your resume the better which is pretty crazy and not true.

Job searching isn’t a numbers game, it’s about finding suitable roles that match your skills and career goals. If you’re applying to 50 different jobs a day or something like that, you’re probably applying to 45 of them that really don’t suit you.

To a recruiter and to hiring managers, the more times we see someone’s resume posted on job boards, the more we wonder why you can’t get a job. I’ve had cases where you keep running into the same person on the job boards and see different versions of the resume where the job title seems to change at the same job, dates don’t match up and stuff like that and immediately I start thinking that I’ve found someone who is lying on their resume and has simply forgotten they have numerous versions of their resume online. This happens quite frequently.

Then you get the people who post multiple resumes on one job board where several of the versions seem to be half completed and I conclude that this person isn’t very detail-oriented and don’t bother contacting them.

It’s pretty interesting how things like this can affect the way people consider you just from viewing your resume and/or your online habits even if you don’t realize it.

The rule of the day relates to contact information that you offer to potential employers and recruiters.

How much contact information do you put on your resume so that hiring managers and recruiters can contact you?

As a recruiter, I sometimes get frustrated when I need to contact someone urgently – contract jobs for example often get filled quickly so I sometimes need to get on the phone with someone asap – and only find an email address for someone or a phone number that just rings and rings when I call it or it’s shut off and has no voice mail.

These days of course, you also find people through LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace or through a Google search so while it’s sometimes easier to find people than before, it can be difficult to actually get them on the phone sometimes.

When it comes to contact information, offering a phone number (ideally a cellphone) with voice mail and an active, professional sounding email address (nothing silly like 2hot4u@isp.com or anything like that) is the best way to go I think.

These days with the rise in identity theft and so on, some people are worried about including a home address in an online profile that could get viewed by thousands of people they don’t know. Personally, I like when a person has their address on their resume because that’s how I find out if they’re applying for jobs in their home area or if they’re dreaming and are applying for a job that is a 1 hour commute away.

Having said that, when you post your resume to major online job boards you can always mention just the city you live in (rather than your complete address) and can probably also mention somewhere the specific geographic area you want to work in.

Bottom line: the easier you make it for people to find you, the easier it will be for them to find you which when you’re looking for a new job, is usually what you want.

Don’t believe the hype when it comes to job search and career management information.

There is a popular Internet job board that advertises on the radio whose ads kind of make me laugh. Their commercials are typical of some of the stuff we hear from people in the job search and career management game.

The commercials always focus on telling people how easy it is for hiring companies to post job ads on their website to find “great staff” and how equally easy it is for job searchers to post their resume for free to find a “better job.”

The commercials use humorous characatures of hiring managers and job searchers – basically exaggerated stereotypes – to show some of the stiffs that exist in the world that many of us have probably bumped into at one point or another in our careers.

Basically, they’re trying to show hiring managers that these sorts of stiffs don’t post resumes in their database while also showing job searchers that these losers don’t post jobs on their website either.

So on the one hand, they tell people how easy it is for anyone to post a job or resume on their website but on the other hand that their website features only a select group of hiring companies and job searchers.

Obviously, the two are conflicting points. I guess it isn’t obvious to them because they’ve been running these ads for a few years now.

Anyone can post a job on an Internet job board.

Anyone can post a resume on an Internet job board.

Internet job boards don’t guarantee any sort of exclusivity or guarantee that only decent companies and skilled job searchers are using them.

In fact, they promote the opposite. That’s why people were to them as monster boards. They try to cast a wide net and sign up as many people as possible. It’s about quantity.

Posting jobs and resumes on job boards is a formality for people these days just like companies once posted ads in the local newspaper when they needed to hire someone even though they knew it would result in them getting dozens if not hundreds of resumes, most of which weren’t suited to the job.

I dealt with one client in the early 2000s who still put every single IT job they had available in the local paper because it was “company policy” as I was told. They’d wait for 3 weeks to weed through the resumes the ad produced and then they’d start working with recruiters like me to help them actually fill the job.

It was the same process every time: pay for an ad in the newspaper that they knew wouldn’t work, and then pay a recruiter like me to help them actually fill the job.

I helped them place 3 people within one year. All three jobs had previously been advertised in the paper, obviously unsuccessfully.

Can you get a job (or hire a person) through an Internet job board?

Of course.

You can probably still get a job or hire a good person through a newspaper ad, too. I got a job from a newspaper ad so I know it can happen.

The point is to set your expectations and don’t allow people to set them for you. Be realistic with your expectations especially as it pertains to what you can accomplish with various career services regardless of how they are promoted.