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.