It’s National Typewriter Day – are YOU using outmoded methods for your career search?
Years ago, most people approached a search by checking the want ads, and mailing out resumes to lots of identified openings. While it wasn’t actually the most effective method, it worked often enough that people continued to do it.
Today, the instant a posting goes on-line, virtually everyone in a search knows about it, and the postings receive hundreds of resumes for each one.
Pursuing your search that way is like slipping a piece of paper under a locked door, and hoping that the guard on the other side is impressed enough with your message that they unlock the door and let you in. Then they plunk you down at the guard desk for a screening. If you pass, they then send a note to the hiring manager to see if they might pick you as one of the handful of candidates to send up for an actual interview.
Real life example:
Someone wrote to me very proud of his diligent search. He told me he had identified at least 25 openings every week, and sent out customized resumes and cover letters to each. How long do you think it took him to land?
2 months? 4 months? 6 months?
It took him a full 2 years to land. And it turned out that a colleague worked for the company where he landed, so that he had an internal advocate.
If he had instead put most of his energy into leveraging relationships, and that colleague had been on his list, he might have instead landed in a month or two!
There’s another side of the equation as well:
A very large percentage of positions never make it to a posting.
If you Google “what percentage of jobs are posted?”, you will see claims that as many as 70% of jobs never get posted, because they are filled through internal referrals, networking and other means before they ever get to that stage.
Suppose as many as half of jobs make it to postings. Can you afford to be ignoring the other half of the job market?
If you want to explore the BEST ways to secure the job and pay you deserve, come to my free webinar on the 29th, “5 Secrets to Landing a Job You’ll Love.”