The Evolution of Job Search

You lost your job, got the pink slip, laid off, redundant, downsized, right-sized. I got “right-sized” once and wanted to right size their lip. I imagine you felt the same way, even if you quit. Whatever the term, you find yourself seeking employment.   (Click on picture above to read the rest of the article)

What’s the first thing you did? Wait, I’ll tell you the things I did: When I got home I yelled at my wife, kicked the dog and dove into a bottle of booze. Well, that’s not quite true, I don’t have a dog. All joking aside, I’m willing to bet you did the following:

  1. You updated your resume.
  2. Found a series of jobs to apply to.
  3. Applied and uploaded your new resume.
  4. Clicked SEND
  5. Then waited for the phone to ring, and waited and waited and waited.

Question: Why do we all of us do this?

Answer: It always worked for us before.

Some of us remember when we would take out the classified section of our Sunday newspaper (do you even get a newspaper?), grab a red pencil, find jobs that are perfect for us, craft a cover letter, add it to our professionally prepared resume written on high quality paper, put a couple stamps on the envelope, march down to the post office and within two to three days someone with two eyes and a brain would READ your submission. Then came computers.

The job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder and Hotjobs!) came into existence in the 1990’s. (Talk about evolution, Hotjobs! has evolved itself out of existence). The aggregators followed (Indeed and Simplyhired which has been purchased by Indeed and now Google Jobs). If you’re going to be on any job board, and you should, I recommend these because if a job is posted anywhere, it will likely be up on the aggregators within twenty-four hours. Today, the darling of job search is LinkedIn. This too shall pass, especially if the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn continues down its current path of draconian changes. The other major mystery of job search is the dominant use of Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software and Boolean searches where great candidates were neither found nor considered because they don’t know how the game is played.

In today’s job search world, you can be the greatest candidate available and not even be considered. If you don’t have the right words in the right quantity formatted correctly, your submission likely will not get through, nor will you get found when they look for people like you.