Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from a recent session with career coach Don Orlando.
Based on the insight shared in this week’s Ask the Coach call, it’s clear that it’s more important than ever to build an online brand presence and post your credentials online where they can be found by discriminating hiring managers. The way corporations are finding qualified job candidates is changing, and to succeed, your tactics need to change along with it.
As Don told those on this week’s call, the current system is antiquated and hopeless broken because it can’t keep up with the demand. Consider the following steps companies use to find candidates:
- Recruiters or hiring companies post openings on one or more or the mega job boards. Since the big job boards don’t maintain exclusive, qualified job listings, chances are those jobs will proliferate throughout the Web, since it is a common practice to scrape and repost job listings. As a result, corporations are inundated with applications, and most of the applicants are not qualified. Why? A recent study shows that recruiters and hiring managers spend on average 15 seconds reviewing a resume; but the average job applicant spends 23 seconds scanning posted job openings.
- Recruiters put together a review panel based on applicants to cull through the mountain of online applications, and narrow them down to three or four likely candidates. If one of those candidates is hired, it means a commission of 25 percent to 33 percent of their annual salary for the recruiter.
- Frustrated with the quality of the candidates they are interviewing, the company starts looking for the candidates themselves, using a spear fishing approach rather than a trawler net to land the types of candidates they need.
This third option is becoming the norm, not the exception. Don notes that more companies are becoming more discriminating in where they post their job listings, and they are proactively searching the Web seeking out qualified job candidates. Corporations are using more targeted job boards, like NETSHARE, to control their job listings, making sure they get higher quality candidates and aren’t flooded with unqualified Internet applicants. They also are using outlets like LinkedIn and the professional forums on NETSHARE, following specialty blogs and industry-specific discussions to find those who write about their industry and provide quality comments for discussion. They then follow these industry experts, make a connection and establish a rapport until those proven experts might entertain an offer.
So why not go where companies are looking for candidates. Don’t get scooped up with all the other Web candidates. Instead, be exclusive, connect with your online peers, and show them what you know and the hiring managers will to seek you out. That’s the new reality.
