Ten Little Online Mistakes that Can Sabotage Your Job Search
- Author Jay Edward Miller
- Published January 23, 2009
- Word count 1,140
Your
resume is the number one most power job search tool in your
arsenal. It has the power to make you successful beyond your
wildest dreams. But if you screw it up, it also has the power
to stop you dead in your tracks.
- Overuse of "blasting" to
distribute your resume. Mailing or emailing hundreds or even
thousands of resumes to employers and recruiters can be
counter-productive. For one thing, you are limited to a
weakened, general, all-purpose version of your resume. Your
cover letter, if you have one, addressed to "Whom It May
Concern" will be meaningless. Your submission will be lumped
with the spam and junk email. You will have no opportunity to
move the process forward by following up with a meaningful
phone call, letter, or email.
And if that isn't bad enough, if
a recruiter or employer reads your resume, they are smart
enough to know that everyone else has a copy of it. If you are
a recruiter and you know a thousand other recruiters have the
same resume, you would know the tough time you would have
earning a commission on the placement. Plus, you might figure
that all the local employers have the resume and could cut you
out of the loop. If employers know that all the other employers
have your resume they may not be interested in competing with
them.
Indiscriminate blasting reduces
your market value. Don't expect quality interviews; expect
interviews for hard-to-fill or high-turnover positions. Some
commission hungry agents will be forgiving and may take a
chance on you, higher class agents and employers will
not.
- Applying for jobs you are not
qualified for. What is the harm? The job looks interesting, the
"apply" link is right there, what is the worse that could
happen? All they can do is say, "no".
If you are unqualified and waste
a recruiter's or employer's time, they will ignore you in the
future. And when their time is wasted, they suddenly have a
memory like an elephant. That is not the way you want to be
remembered in a job search. Plus, how smart does it make you
look?
- Not customizing your resume
and cover letter for each employer. The Internet makes it so
much easier to investigate companies. Corporate websites will
tell you exactly what they are looking for in employees.
Leverage these resources. The resume and cover letter are the
most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal. And with today's
technology, sending a generic resume and cover letter is
inexcusable.
- Giving up control of your job
search. The "Hand Over" job seeker, one that places his or her
job search in the hands of one or more online professionals,
usually headhunters, recruiters, employment agencies, or
outplacement firms, thinks all he or she has to do is show up
for the interviews.
The cliche that job hunting is a
full time job is true. The Internet does not make a job search
easier, it makes it more complicated.
No one is going to be as
passionate about your future as you are; no one is going to
understand what you want like you do. Professional help is just
that - help. Passive job seekers get left behind.
- Ignoring privacy when posting
your resume. There are any number of bad things that can happen
if you do not limit your contact information.
- Your employer could find your
resume online, accuse you of disloyalty and fire
you.
- Someone could steal your
identity. This has become an alarmingly common crime. Protect
yourself.
- You could be buried in spam and
bugged by telemarketers. They scan the Internet looking for
email addresses and phone numbers to harvest. It may not be the
worse thing in the world, but it can be a real pain in the
neck.
- Unscrupulous recruiters,
fishing for a commission, may take your resume and shop you
around to employers without your permission. This can harm you
in any number of ways. Just a note: An ethical recruiter would
never dream of doing this.
- Limiting yourself to big name
job sites. Most of the big name sites are great sites. They are
expensive for employers to use and they tend to be general -
all things for all people. Ironically, that means they are not
for everybody. Many employers have found their needs met by
advertising in smaller, localized, less expensive, niche sites.
Don't limit your options by ignoring these valuable
resources.
- Limiting yourself to Internet
only. The Internet is so ubiquitous it is easy to feel like
everything that is out there shows up on the Web. The so-called
hidden job market is a very real phenomenon. The majority of
jobs are never advertised on the Web or anywhere else. They are
often filled word of mouth. By the time you see jobs on the
Internet much of the cream is skimmed off. It is often the jobs
that cannot be filled by word of mouth that get
advertised.
- Ignoring the threat of
viruses. Of course if you send an email to an employer that
contains a virus it will be quarantined and deleted. Your
message will not be read and you will not look good to the
company. Your future messages will likely be
blocked.
The problem for you, the job
hunter, is not so much actually sending a virus. Most of you, I
hope, scan your incoming and outgoing emails for viruses (if
you don't, start NOW!). The problem is that employers take
precaution against potential threats of viruses. Many companies
will not open email attachments. That is certainly
understandable with Microsoft Word documents, often a virus
carrier. But many companies have taken a scorched earth policy
and have banned all attachments.
How does this effect you? If you
want your resume and cover letter read, send it in the body of
the email. You may have some formatting limitations, but better
than having your message deleted.
- Using email as your only
source of contact. I ran into this one recently. I called a
business meeting by contacting everyone by email. A key
individual did not show up. Turns out my email didn't make it
past his spam filter.
Since 75% of email is "junk,"
most companies have a spam filter. If your message looks like
spam to the spam filter you are filtered out and deleted. Call
first to let them know your email is coming, call afterwards to
confirm they got it, and send a hard copy by regular mail as a
back up.
- This last one is not so much
a mistake as a tip. Many job hunters have the mistaken belief
that in an online job search cover letters don't carry any
weight and allow them to be generic and impersonal. Many job
hunters have been leaving the cover letter out entirely. This
is a huge mistake.
Jay Edward Miller is the author Irresistible Resume, the definitive guide for writing your own resume. More information can be found at http://resumesavvyllc.com and http://savvyresume.com
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