What is the best way to get your own personal advertising campaign before the proper audience? Sometimes you need to be selective, and sometimes you need to saturate the market.
Your resume is ready to go. Now where would you post it?
Job seekers would expect an easy answer – post it anywhere and everywhere – but you’ll receive different suggestions on even that first step in your job search, depending on your own particular circumstances.
Some experts, such as for example Steve Burdan, a certified professional resume writer who can tell you to “shoot at whatever moves. There’s} no bad place to post (your resume),” he said. “(You just) never know where that golden contact will come from.”
Other job-search experts, urge job seekers to be much more selective. Posting randomly won’t enable you to customize your resume for specific employers or opportunities in the event that you post it to a huge selection of job sites or blast it to countless recruiters or employers.
The case for saturation
Distributing your resume is really a numbers game: The more people who see your resume, the greater your odds will be connecting with the best opportunity.
There’s no bad place to post, and job seekers shouldn’t restrict themselves (unless you’ll need to keep your job search quiet).
Here is how to saturate
If you choose to post on all the major job sites and display your resume to as many recruiters that you can, you are able to save time by hiring somebody to post for you. To that particular end, Ventureready offers this resume-distribution services.
Such services are tailored to particular industries; for instance, you will find resume-distribution services for the medical-device industry, in addition to a site for distributing resumes to pharmaceutical, medical and biotech sales recruiters. Alternatively, a few of these services, such as Ventureready.net, feature one-stop resume posting to most major career Web sites and job banks.
The case for moderation
Joyce is editor, publisher and Webmaster of Job-Hunt, a well known employment portal. She believes that “blasting” your resume at a huge selection of job sites or even to hundreds of recruiters and employers “is really a self-defeating strategy.”
You won’t have the ability to customize it for a particular employer or opportunity, which reduces your chances to be called, and, you won’t have the ability to follow up the resume with a call or an e-mail to establish contact and move your application forward in the process.
A job seeker who inundates in boxes and job sites are often diluting his or herself, in the unlikely event that somebody receives your resume who could have been interested in you, they realize that everybody else has a copy of it, too. If the recipient is an independent recruiter, he’ll ignore it because he’ll realize that he’ll have a difficult time earning a commission on your placement (an employer could also have received it directly or competing recruiters might be ‘shopping’ your resume around to the exact same employers). An employer probably won’t be interested in competing with other employers.
How to conduct a discrete job search
Finally, in the event that you want to keep your job search under wraps and discretion is the concern, you need to start your search within your own personal network. Another step would be to speak with a selection of executive recruiters. You can find one in, what recruiters call the “Red Book,” the “Directory of Executive and Professional Recruiters 2009-2010.” This directory lists recruiters by industry, niche and geographic location.
In the event that you want to be cautious about who knows that you’re looking and who cares, you need to move slowly. You do not want to post online. If you post online, your company knows you’re looking, and they’ll confront you, and you’re going to discover real fast what your company thinks of you. Either they’ll throw money at you or let you go real fast.
Whenever possible YOU should control the speed of your transition in to a new position, but keep in mind: Large employers may be just as proactive as job seekers in regards to trying to find who’s looking for a job online in public forums. “The Internet may be the big, wild frontier,” and most job seekers are unlikely to know what applications their employers are utilizing to track who’s looking for employment.