Posts Tagged ‘job seekers’
The Rules For Job Hunting Have Changed
Reposted from HR News
Paul Anderson wants you to forget just about everything you think you know about finding a job.
“Many changes have happened in the job market since 20 years ago, since 10 years ago – since last October,” said Anderson, a former hiring manager for Microsoft and Expedia.
Even since March. Three months ago, roughly 100 résumés an hour got posted on job-search Web sites. Now that number exceeds 400 resumes an hour, Anderson said.
You want a job? Join the club.
Some 13.7 million Americans want jobs but can’t find one – up by 6 million in the last 12 months. The private sector dumped 611,000 jobs in April, according to the latest report from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“You have so many people out there looking. Revenues are down at companies in most industries. Needs are becoming very specific. Fewer jobs are available. Some companies are trying to hire people at bargain prices. There’s fierce competition and overqualified candidates willing to take anything,” Anderson told a congregation of job seekers in Tacoma recently.
Anderson, principal at Kirkland-based ProLango Consulting, says job hunting these days has morphed into a new industry he calls Career Search 2.0. With his background in psychology, he doesn’t call himself a career consultant. No, he’s a behavioral specialist, because job hunters need to understand human behavior and outfox the system.
He offered five ways to tackle a job search in the new world.
First, scrap the elevator pitch – your 30-second soundbite that describes what you do so you can sell yourself in a flash, Anderson said.
“Why the elevator pitch doesn’t work,” Anderson said, “is that nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. You have to change your mindset from self-serving to serving others.”
That means finding out what need you can fill for the recruiters and other hiring authorities you meet.
Second, at job fairs, don’t bring a sheaf of résumés and hand them out to recruiters like Halloween candy. They’ll wind up in the garbage.
Instead, get business cards from the recruiters. Ask them what kinds of jobs they need to fill and what kind of candidates they like. Note that on the back of the business card. If you know a lot of people in town, tell them so and say you’ll steer qualified candidates their way. Then follow up when you get home. Ask the recruiter to meet for 15 minutes over coffee.
“People buy from people they like and trust,” Anderson said. “You can’t build a relationship at a job fair. Instead of being a desperate jobless person looking for work, turn yourself from a stranger into a contact. When you contribute first, reciprocity will kick in.”
Recruiters have extensive networks of contacts. If you help a recruiter fill a job, you have just tapped into that recruiter’s vast network. Even if they don’t recruit for your expertise, Anderson guarantees they know someone who does.
Third, leverage online social networks, primarily LinkedIn.com, the No. 1 online business network, to connect with as many people as possible.
Online networks allow you to find and seek advice from contacts who work for the companies you have targeted for your job search, it allows others to endorse you, and it allows you to post specific information about the job you want, Anderson said.
Other online social networks, such as Facebook, focus more on users’ personal lives – where you should “show yourself as a stable family person who’s serving the community. If you have a dog, put up a picture,” Anderson said.
“When you submit a résumé, three things happen,” he said. “The hiring manager will look for you on LinkedIn to see what kind of endorsements you have. They’ll look on Facebook for pictures of you at drunken parties. And they’ll ‘Zillow’ your address to see where you live, the value of your property, how long you’ve lived there and if you can reasonably commute to a job.”
Fourth, get your résumé off of all job-search Web sites such as Monster.com and Dice.com, Anderson said.
“They’re too expensive. Plus 85 percent of jobs are filled from word of mouth,” he said. “Use LinkedIn instead for targeting people at companies you want to work for … and get into conversations.”
Try to secure informational interviews, informal conversations where you seek advice from someone at your target company.
“Many times open positions don’t make it to online job boards,” Anderson said. “You want to build rapport with those hiring managers you met informally” so they remember you later.
Finally, Anderson said, stay off the recruiters’ blacklists.
You didn’t know they had them? Anderson told his class of job seekers that recruiters have begged him to delete this tip from his seminars. He hasn’t.
Every major company has a computerized database to manage its applicants, their résumés and notes about all interactions. Those companies also have a separate database – the blacklist – where they kick out all the problem applicants who have no chance to get hired, he said.
How do you kill your chances? Multiple ways. Visit a company’s Web site, put 80 jobs in your job cart and click “Apply All.” Anderson said it shows you as desperate rather than focused. If you come across as rude to a recruiter screening you by phone, you’ll get kicked onto the blacklist. If, during a meeting, you complain, have bad body language or appear depressed, it’s the blacklist for you.
“Every time you show up, you have the opportunity to become one of the good ones,” Anderson said. “Take it.”
Dan Voelpel:
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
http://www.thenewstribune.com/voelpel/story/770211.html
How Video Resumes Came to Be
How Video Resumes Came to Be
Video resumes were the first attempt by job seekers to break out of the keyword trap and get around the computer screening programs. So how did the candidate screening market get to this frustration point for the job seeker, AND for the recruiter?
LIKE IT OR NOT, TIME MARCHES ON… Technology marches on… Tools get more progressive and disruption happens. Change happens. For about 50 years, the paper resume has ruled within corporations seeking new employees. People are used to it… People are comfortable with it. We were taught to write resumes in black ink on white paper and mail them out using stamps.
And then resumes became “soft-copy” (Yes there was a time when that was not a real word). The online resume became accessible instantly to several viewers at a time, and storable and retrievable.
And then came text search capability and KEYWORDS along with that. So today the comfort zone is not paper resumes anymore. It is soft-copy keyword-searchable resumes.
Today, the industry has deemed this as standard, and many vendor products have been developed to help parse, and poke, and rank and rate these KEYWORDS and their relevance to matching KEYWORDS in job descriptions, for instance.
RECRUITER FRUSTRATION
And, as most every system can be “gamed”, job seekers can now populate the KEYWORD section in their resume to match a job description and submit it with a keystroke, whether or not they are qualified. It is then incumbent upon the Recruiter to read through that mass of electronically “qualified” resumes to identify the truly qualified.
So Recruiters don’t have much time on their hands to really read a resume thoroughly –
- too much volume
- too many resumes look the same, populated with keywords from the online job description
- not enough time to do a thorough job — hiring managers need to hire NOW
CANDIDATE FRUSTRATION
Job Candidates were initially impressed when the Employer sent them immediate feedback after applying for a job. “Finally”, they thought. “This company cares.” Thoughtful “no thank-you” letters arrived minutes after an online resume submission. But this again was simply a production letter generated by the company’s ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and sent to all candidates who did not populate their resume with the correct keywords.
Enter VIDEO RESUMES
What does anyone do when they want attention? Yell louder.
The Video Resume is a louder yell: “HEY! Look at me!” “See how I talk – I’m 3-dimensional.”
As a headhunter, I talk to dozens of executives each week whose only objective is to “get in front of the hiring manager”. They don’t want tips about the newest keywords to use. Job seekers are tired of playing the keyword game, knowing full well that every other candidate for the same job is using the same keywords. And their patience is wearing thin with 22-year old internal corporate “recruiters” who call them up to ask simple questions – the answers to which are clearly on their resume. And lastly, job seekers have figured out the “mass email” tools that come with every ATS, and realize that no one actually reads their resume enough to grasp their total value as a candidate.
The first ever YouTube video was put up in April 23, 2005 by some guy at the zoo talking about elephants. And that was all it took. Now, every minute, twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
So, naturally, video would be the new channel to use to get noticed. And candidates looking for jobs are eager to find ways to stand out from the mass of keyword-laden resumes, and to virtually “get in front of the hiring manager”. Armed with a PC or a Mac, and a $50 webcam, a job seeker can easily create a video as simple as a “talking head” – reading their resume in front of a camera.
Granted, there are issues galore with “video resumes”, many covered in our previous blog, but every new idea starts out a little rocky.
In time (and in the not so distant future), Video Resumes, as all other new products, will enter the professional realm and become more relevant to specific jobs, more polished as a tool, and have more industry-developed rules around them.
The first step is to change Video Resumes into Video Interviews. Stay tuned for more on that.
