Can you click your way to a new job or is there a better way?

How many times have you done the same thing over and over again, not gotten the result you’re looking for but kept doing the same thing(s) repeatedly and were surprised that your result still didn’t change?

It seems to be human nature that we often get comfortable with something and keep doing it whether or not it actually helps us in any real way.

These days sending off dozens or hundreds of resumes to various hiring managers is an easy thing to do but of course it’s equally as easy for everyone else to fire off a similar number of resumes so the question becomes “how effective is it to spend most of your time job searching on the same Internet job sites that everyone else is?”

Certainly people do get jobs online so there can be some benefit to spending some time utilizing the online job boards but it really is a numbers game as you try to separate yourself from everyone else who is trying to accomplish the same thing you are i.e. get the attention of a hiring manager through an emailed job submission.

If you find that you’re doing the same thing over and over again with your job search and aren’t getting the results you’re looking for, mix it up and try some new things.

Here are a few things you can do to separate yourself from the crowd when searching for a new job.

And here’s a post on balancing quality versus quantity which is certainly timely considering we’re talking about job searching online.

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.

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.

With the prevalence of various social media websites, many people have come to rely on them to find a new job with varying results. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other popular websites are certainly popular examples of websites that can help you broadcast your name and profile.

Plus, you can post your resume on all sorts of online job boards and try your luck at finding a job this way, too.

Of course, everyone else can do the same thing so it can quickly become a case of wondering how much time and effort should you place on these websites to help you take the next step in your career?

Looking at it another way, what percentage of your time should be spent utilizing these methods versus more traditional ways of finding a new job like applying for specific jobs, networking, knocking on doors and visiting companies, etc?

Ultimately, you’ll need to figure out yourself how to dedicate your time and efforts but if most or all of your time is spent utilizing only social media websites and strictly limiting your job search to using these methods, you’re severely limiting the odds of finding a new, better job.

Working in recruitment – as with any position that involves hiring staff or helping people find jobs – showed me just how many people often apply for one job and try to battle it out (figuratively of course) with all the other candidates for often just one available position.

It’s not uncommon for companies to receive hundreds and possibly thousands of applications for a job they have advertised through online job boards or in the old days, through newspaper ads.

For large high profile companies, it may be common for them to receive hundreds or thousands of applications to their website every day even when they don’t have jobs available.

How can you stand out from the pack when you simply become one of hundreds or thousands of other candidates?

Often, you can’t.

Jobs are still won and lost in face to face situations whether in the job interview, networking event or a chance meeting with a hiring manager who gets to know you in a formal or informal setting and decides to pursue you as a potential hire with their firm.

Getting out from behind your computer and showing people your personality is the way you stand out from the pack and remains the best way to separate yourself from other people applying for the same jobs you are.

Many times, I’ve received a resume from someone that seems too good to be true…

…then I meet the person face to face and realize that this is in fact the case. In other words, their resume made them look better than they actually were.

Conversely, I’ve also met people with a subpar resume who upon meeting them, cause me to realize that they are underselling themselves and perhaps need to do a better job of selling themselves honestly but with impact through their resume.

In other words, looks can be deceiving and again, it’s often the face to face meeting that ends up sorting this out.

But if you’re only using online methods to conduct your job search, you’re limiting not only your opportunities to find a new job but also your opportunities to show potential hiring managers your personality, skills and intangibles that often can’t be promoted through online means.

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.

I recently signed up for a free newsletter for a resume writing service whose website I had visited.

In the first newsletter I received, I was surprised that it contained two “great methods” (in the words of the person writing the newsletter) to use during the job search process.

The first method suggested paying a small fee – someone has to make money on this, right? – and having your resume posted instantly on over 90 career sites including many of the big job boards we’ve all heard of plus a bunch of other ones too.

Slapping your resume up on numerous job boards doesn’t accomplish much since everyone can do the same thing just as easily. If anything it makes these job boards even more of a waste of time since it makes it harder for hiring managers to effectively search them. When recruiters see your resume posted on many different job boards, they start wondering why you can’t find a job. Hiring managers probably do the same.

The second suggested job search method involved paying another small fee to have your resume sent out to a “ton of recruiters.” I’m not sure how many recruiters constitute one ton although I guess the old adage of “if you throw enough you-know-what against a wall, something is bound to stick” is the goal here.

I used to work for a recruitment company that signed up for a free trial for one of these resume blasting services. At least by offering the service for free, the resume blasting service had found their optimal price point I guess. The resumes we were sent ended up in the Deleted folder quite quickly without even being read. We were bombarded by resumes from people from all over North America and simply couldn’t be bothered to read them. I suspect many job searchers who pay for this sort of service are legitimately surprised when they don’t get a single response from any one of the people who receive their resume.

I guess it goes to show you that some people should stick to what they know and if it’s writing resumes, then they shouldn’t stray into the field of job searching and career management. If they knew anything about either of these subjects, they’d know that plastering your resume on every job search board and/or firing your resume off to hundreds of recruiters is not only a waste of time, but a good way to devalue your resume and ultimately your own worth.

Plus, you completely lose control of your resume and control over the number of people who know you’re actively looking for a new job. This is especially important if you’re working at the time. Who knows who might get hold of your resume from one of those resume blasting services…your current boss for example?

Most companies who are hiring and run ads on an Internet job board or in the newspaper will probably say “no phone calls please” or something to that effect. Basically, they don’t want dozens if not hundreds of people calling them regarding a particular job especially these days when it’s so easy to attract hundreds of people who might be interested in the same job.

The issue of course is when you email your resume into a particular company, you’re taking your chances that it will actually be read by the person(s) receiving it while it’s amongst the possibly hundreds of other applicants.

If I saw a job posting that states the hiring manager’s name and even if there is no phone number – you can easily get that from the company’s website – I’d consider calling the hiring manager directly before emailing them my resume. This can be a good tactic if you’re pursuing a job that requires you to get on the phone with people and show initiative, like sales jobs or perhaps a public relations role for example.

Alternatively, I might email my resume and follow up the next morning to give the person a chance to read my resume. I did this when I was searching for a recruiter job and had seen a job posted online. When I got on the phone with the hiring manager, I got to answer a few of his questions up front and piqued his interest in my skillset. Plus, it turned out that we both knew a guy who had previously been my manager and had previously been a colleague of the hiring manager I was speaking with.

Guess what the hiring manager did the moment after he got off the phone with me?

He called this guy that we both knew and did a quick reference check on me, to see if I was worth hiring. I ended up getting the job.

Most managers don’t want to weed through hundreds of resumes if they can speak with a qualified person who took the initiative to call them directly. This is especially true if you’re applying for a job that requires phone skills, initiative, salesmanship and other qualities, qualities that you help to prove when you pick up the phone and call the manager instead of just emailing them and waiting for them to call you.

Sure, some managers won’t like the fact that you called them but with any luck, you’ll get a few minutes on the phone to figure out if they’re interested in you and if you’re really interested in them. It might save you the time of having to attend an interview to get the same questions answered in person.

The Internet has made job searching easier and harder at the same. It’s easier to fire your resume off to dozens or hundreds of companies quite quickly and feel like you’ve accomplished something. It’s harder to understand how so many of us got tricked into thinking that this was a good use of our time over the long term.

Of course if it’s easier to email your resume to hundreds of different companies, it’s equally easy for everyone else to do the same thing. The likelihood that you will land a job through this method becomes more remote as more people use them since you’re just competing with a greater number of people for the same jobs. The whole Internet job board phenomenon has gone from being a meet market to a defeat market. I just thought of that.

Even the job board companies themselves now admit this and that’s why the new breed of job boards try to differentiate themselves by catering to niche markets like the $100K+ jobs segment. The people who run these sites arrogantly sniff that only those who offer $100K+ jobs or hold $100K+ jobs are allowed to join this exclusive club. This – we’re led to believe – will help to weed out the unwashed masses who don’t meet the $100K+ requirement either as an employer or job searcher. These are the same unwashed masses who helped to make the company’s earlier online job boards that were open to anyone with a pulse such a success in the first place (a success for the job board companies anyways).

Of course, companies who overstate the income potential for their jobs and people who overstate their income are schemes that are older than mud. People lie and people exaggerate.

How much back checking is done by these $100K+ job boards to ensure that both employers and job candidates are in fact $100K+ material in reality? If I was paying to use this sort of service and wasn’t asked to confirm my $100K+ income with proof up front, I’d be suspect as to the likelihood that the employers I was interested in actually had $100K+ jobs. If these jobs are legit, I’d want the employer to guarantee in writing that I’d be earning $100K+ every year beginning with year one. Afterall, that’s why everyone is paying to use this sort of site in the first place.

These days, an online job search forms the basis of what many people define as a “job search.”

When you apply to numerous companies by email or through their online job submission form and you don’t get (m)any suitable response(s), don’t automatically assume there is something wrong with you. Applying to jobs through online means such as job boards is generally a crapshoot as it is.

That’s why the big job boards brag about how many jobs they have available and how many millions of resumes they have record of. They’re admitting that their gig is a numbers game although oddly enough they never seem to brag about (or even mention) the percentage of total jobs that are filled through their respective job board and not through another means.

With many large companies now operating their own resume databases chock full of the profiles of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, it becomes more difficult for everyone to get use out of these databases, both job searchers and hiring managers.

Typically, a person searching these databases for resumes needs to try many different permutations and combinations of keywords to locate people who are actually suitable for the job they’re looking to fill.

The keywords that you use in your resume will therefore play an important part in your success, too. If you don’t include the popular keywords that hiring managers type in when looking to find someone like you, they might end up finding the people competing against you for the job in question, but not you.

In other words, the value of these job board databases is only as good as the people searching them and the people who wrote the resumes contained therein.

As a recruiter, I remember searching some of the large job boards for people and found that sometimes, you end up with what you think is a decent keyword list but when you start reading through the resumes that turn up in the search, you have to read through 10 irrelevant ones to find a resume that is close to what you’re looking for. So then I’d add a keyword to my list and suddenly I’d get a much smaller list of resumes that in many cases, still didn’t show the type of person I was looking for.

Then I’d give up and try to actually find a person for the job using the methods recruiters used to use before the Internet existed.

Bottom line, you can spend a lot of time using job boards to conduct what you think is a good online job search when in fact all you’re doing is wasting time filling hiring managers’ in boxes with resumes that they may never even bother reading.

People who don’t know anything about offering career advice want to charge you money to tell you what they don’t know.

The people who make the most money on the Internet seem to be those who charge other people money to tell them how to make money on the Internet. They sell products that are marketed as increasing online profitability but accidentally forget to mention that when discussing profitability, they were referring to themselves and not their customers.

Similarly, not knowing anything about job search advice or career advice will not necessarily prevent some people from offering it to you for a fee.

If you were convinced by someone that paying for a service that email your resume to thousands of recruiters or posts your resume on hundreds of online job boards was a good idea, you were wrong. And there is swampland in Florida with your name on it.

Mass emailing your resume to hundreds or thousands of faceless and nameless recipients is like doing the same with your name and phone number and expecting to get a date. You might get on You Tube or become part of a chain email but not for the right reasons.

Use common sense. When it comes to career and job search advice, listen to people who make sense and who offer advice you can actually use. Mass emailing your resume to people makes no sense on so many levels. Think of all the spam you receive in your in box. Do you open every single one or mass delete them upon seeing them? That’s what happens to your mass emailed resume too. Assuming it even reaches the recipient and didn’t get caught by a spam filter.

I’ve learned that many people market themselves not based on what they know, but how much of their products they’ve already sold, as if to suggest that this is proof they know what they are doing.

These days, the Internet has made it really easy to fire your resume off in all sorts of directions and place it upon every single job board you can find. Just remember it’s just as easy for other people to do the same thing, meaning that it just became a lot harder for people looking to hire staff to actually weed through all this stuff to find you.