Win in Today's Job Search: Don't Apply Online

The Old Job Search: Not too long ago, if you were in the job hunt, you’d see an ad, or maybe hear about a job opening from someone you know, and you’d turn in your resume or fill out an application to 15 or 20 companies total, get 3-4 interviews, get 1-2 offers, you’d take one, and it would all be over. Today’s Job Search: Today’s job search is nothing like the old job search. Today, it looks more like this: You see job postings online, and apply to maybe 50 jobs—and the most you get back are the “Dear John” letters telling you that they will let you know when they are ready to move forward. What’s changed? For one thing, when you see a job online, thousands of other candidates have also seen that job opening and they have applied, too. Human Resource departments are inundated with applications. So unless you are PERFECT for the job, you’re never going to hear anything back. You’re a smart candidate: You understand that if you want the job, you have to get the interview. But with this system, your odds are slim to none. So what should you do? You need to go around the system. If you want to land an interview, you have to go directly to the hiring manager. The hiring manager hasn’t seen all those hundreds or thousands of resumes. Human Resources screens those resumes for them using a narrow set of keywords and specific qualifications, so they don’t even see the vast majority of applicants. So out of a thousand applications, the hiring manager may only see 15 of them. What does that mean for you? If you approach the hiring manager in a very professional but persistent way, communicating to him what you have to offer, that’s a unique message that the hiring manager won’t be seeing often. And that will get you the attention you need to secure the interview. So if you want a different result than what you’ve been getting, you need to approach this job search differently: skip HR and approach the hiring manager directly. And I don’t mean 15-20 hiring managers. I mean 50, 100, or even 200 hiring managers. Use all your contacts. Use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Find as many hiring managers as you can. One of them is going to have a job for you, and you just need to find them. And you only need one.