Overcoming Job Board Addiction: Part II

 
OK, so in Part I of this series I might have ruffled a few feathers by referring to what I see as a "job board addiction."

Listen. If job boards are working for you, you have so many hot opportunities lined up and your pick of good positions with great salaries, then that's awesome! You are one of the lucky ones then.  

But that's my point: With an effectiveness rate of only 1-7%, more people lose than win.

In the whole job search picture, job boards and online postings are not all that effective; yet candidates put the bulk of their efforts into them.

The reason for their ineffectiveness is there is a lot going on behind these postings that you can't anticipate. For one thing, some jobs are posted but really are already filled, but for various reasons, the company still posts for the position and goes through the motion of interviewing candidates. A large percentage of organizations now dump all entries into an automated Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that tries to weed through applicant resumes to sift out the best qualified ones. Of course, if applicants don't guess the parameters used by the company's specific ATS, their resume could be tossed out without any human every laying eyes on it. Furthermore, if all of that isn't enough to discourage the average job seeker, the average number of submissions to these online postings is running in the hundreds these days, which means you are effectively being dumped in with the masses.

So even if you are the perfect candidate, first you have to differentiate from the masses, then you have to make it through a complex and mysterious human-less process called the ATS, and finally even if you succeed through all of that and get called in for an interview, you still have to hope the job really is "open" and you aren't just fulfilling some internal company regulation that says every position must be posted and external candidates must be interviewed before the internal candidate can be promoted. (But, hey, miracles do happen....1-7% of the time!).

Shifting our mindset is not easy to do.

My overall philosophy when it comes to a job search is that in today's market where you are likely to switch jobs every 3 to 4 years, candidates should create career-long pipelines that put them in a position for opportunities to be brought to them instead of trying your luck with the masses. I call it networking with positioning, and it is more along the lines of what an entrepreneur or small business owner has to do to create business development and stay solvent. Although it takes a shift in mindset and it requires some preparation, it is much more effective and logical than trying to unlock some secret job posting code that really has very little logic behind it.

But, hey, since when has a job search ever been a logical proposition?