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Online Job Hunting Hints By Penelope Trunk

No matter whether the job market is good or bad, the best jobs require talent before you walk in the door you need to know how to use the Internet effectively in your job search. Here are six tips to help you improve your online results:

1. Big job sites cater to applicants who understand the importance of keywords. Only three to five percent of jobseekers find employment through online job sites. In order to be one of this small percentage, you need to tailor your resume to keyword searches. “Sending a resume to a big company’s website is like sending your resume into a black hole,” warns John Sullivan, human resources consultant and professor of management at San Francisco State University. “In a big company, your resume is sorted by an applicant tracking system.”

High-profile companies receive thousands of resumes a month and the tracking system sorts them by skills. Sullivan tells of a study where researchers took a job opening and wrote 100 ‘perfect’ resumes for that opening. Then the researchers added 10 percent more information to the resumes. Of those resumes, only 12 percent were picked up by the tracking system as qualified. This demonstrates that even if you are the perfect candidate, if you submit your resume blindly to a large company, there is almost a 90-percent chance that no human will ever see it.

But you can increase your chances by knowing how to use keywords in your resume. “Recruiters locate individuals based on a certain skill set of the job they are looking to fill,” explains recruiting advisor Matt Millunchick. So try to imagine how someone else would use a search box to find you, and be very specific about your skills.

These rules also remain true if you post your resume to an online database. The mass of resumes on job sites is so unruly that human resources departments are paying people in India $20 an hour to sort through resumes and find the best ones, according to David Hanley, owner of Recruitn.com. So, even in this case, keywords are your best friend.

2. Don’t depend on your resume. The typical resume is linear, which makes people without linear careers look like a mess. The resume highlights work gaps in a negative way and leaves little space for achievements and experiences that did not somehow contribute to corporate life.

“The marketplace is changing and the life experience that informs the work that people do is changing,” says Anne Burdick, information designer and professor at Art Center College of Design. The static linear resume is not an effective way to convey this new experience, so don’t lead with it.

Dana Zemack, a publicist, got an agency job by abandoning the conventional resume: She wrote a letter to the agency about how she had been throwing large, elaborate, chocolate tasting parties and charging admission. Zemack explained that, at first, she publicized the parties to make sure she’d make enough money to pay for the festivities. But then she realized that she had talent as both a party planner and a publicist, so she started planning bigger and bigger parties. “I used my own endeavors as an experiment to see how far I could go as a publicist,” she wrote. On a second page, she listed the publicity she was able to generate for the parties.

It worked. She got the job. Which leads to tip number three:

3. Go local. Smaller companies posting on smaller job sites don’t care whether prospective employees have a resume optimized for computer screening. This is how Zemack found her job.

Another way to go small is to join professional groups on MySpace.com. These are people who will know where jobs are. Also, Millunchick says recruiters search for marketing and technical people through these groups.

4. Focus on the referral. Eighty percent of available jobs are not posted on job boards. But people who work at companies with hiring needs know what positions are available. And employers love referrals, because referral employees have such low turnover.

In fact, many companies pay employees tens of thousands of dollars for a successful referral. Pander to that carrot system by offering yourself up to an employee at one of those companies.

Find people to refer you by looking on sites such as MySpace, Friendster and Linkedin. Do keyword searches to see if your friends of friends have jobs at companies that interest you.

Offline networking works, too. It’s just slower. There’s no keyword search when you walk into a party. But once you’ve made an acquaintance, you can Google the person to find their connections.

5. Stalk your dream job. If you know your dream job but you have no connections, identify a key person to talk to, and use the Internet to get in touch with them: Find an email address, phone number, a conference your target is speaking at. Then ask for an informational interview.

You are far more likely to get a job from an informational interview than from blindly sending resumes. Most people will be flattered by your request and will give you some of their time. Remember, though, that an informational interview is not the time to ask for a job. But often, if you make a good impression, the person will help you get hired.

6. Make your own job. Zemack’s career really took off when she created a job for herself throwing chocolate tasting parties. She is still genuinely touched by each person who turned out for those early parties where she bet her credit rating on herself. And in the end, she discovered something that is not a new rule at all: That believing in yourself and creating avenues for your own success attracts a magnificent network of supporters.

Penelope Trunk writes the Brazen Careerist blog. Her new book, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success (Warner Business Books, 2007), is available at Amazon.com. E-mail her at penelope@penelopetrunk.com.