Job Search 2.0 has been a reality since 2006 - Why aren't candidates using it?

Why do so few use this to their advantage?

For the past few years, there's been a revolution going on in employment markets....let's call it Job Search 2.0.

Starting with vertical search engines like indeed.com and others, job seekers started having greater advantages than ever before in their careers.But along with advantages, there became new challenges. In fact, the whole job seeking game has been turned upside down in the past few years.

In my experience as a recruiter, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to help some brilliant people. But most of these otherwise brilliant people fought me kicking and screaming, when I tried to modernize their job search strategy.

Why? They learned how to job hunt when they graduated college – 20, 30, 40 years ago. And it’s served them well. BUT THINGS CHANGED……

The job changer's challenge now is - How do I stand out? For most jobs posted on the major sites, the employer gets hundreds (if not THOUSANDS) or responses. The employers’ HR department is charged with screening these down to 10-20 that get interviews.

Ugly Truth #1 – YOUR RESUME IS NOT LIKELY TO BE READ BY A HUMAN: Both Monster and CareerBuilder have tools to help employers pre-screen resumes, so that HR departments can choose the top 2-3% for review, and interview maybe ½ of those.

Ugly Truth #2 – YOUR COVER LETTER GETS THROWN AWAY: In the age of heavy bond printed resumes, we were taught to write a customized cover letter for each job. Today, cover letters are stripped, and not used for the pre-screening process.

But in my experience as a recruiter, I RARELY saw candidates use even the most basic of the new tools at their disposal, to make these ugly truths work for them. Instead, most just blindly sent resumes to anything that looked remotely close, and were frustrated that they couldn’t get interviews.

The purpose of this blog is to help people make successful job changes using modern tools at their disposal…RIGHT NOW. For additional help and information, please jump to my website at www.reCareered.com.

Here’s a post from August 2006 to give readers an idea just how long this has been around…..http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/08/28/job-search-20-theres-something-happening-here/

So how can you change your past patterns to use these new tools? Stay tuned…..