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The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several potential challenges. It also adds some complexities, and a lot more things to think about…and be mindful of.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personalized, very targeted marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network is your source for job information.

So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on Craigslist and got 650 responses in a week. For a single opening. That’s increased job hunting competition.

Had a suitable candidate contacted us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have secured the position prior to getting all that competition. How? By knowing an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew of the job for at least 13 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your cover letter and resume carefully! When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily taken out with a swift triage process. How? The same way any HR professional would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By passing over candidates whose cover letters gave us grounds not to hire them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating job hunters whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by eliminating job hunters who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the good news is that job boards give you a feel of who is hiring, and for what kinds of positions. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well thought out resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.

Another issue to be aware of is how quickly you can be checked out on the internet. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some pictures and comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to rock our thinking about who to choose.

AA-Careers provides a encompassing set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.

Be careful out there, and good hunting!

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