Hide and seek, a classic children’s game. The premise is simple. One child is “the seeker” and all the rest are asked to hide. The last one hiding is the winner.
Job Search is just the opposite. You want to be the first one “caught”. Thus, you need to be the most obvious place “the seeker” will find you. Put another way, you need to visible in the most likely place “the seeker” will be looking.
In the Winter-Spring 2010 Staffing Management magazine, there is an article called: New Age of Recruiting Relies on Direct Contact. The article was based on the finding of JCSI Corporate Staffing survey of Human Resource professionals. Interestingly, the survey participants said they have no plans to use; TV/radio ads, online videos, open houses or newspaper ads. So where are companies looking to fill open positions?
If you are a job seeker and you want to “get caught”, you need to put these additional survey finding to work:
Human resource professionals plan to increase:
- The usage of LinkedIn
- The usage of Facebook & Twitter
- Tapping into employee referrals
- Their own corporate websites as a recruiting platform.
Human resource professionals plan to decrease:
- The usage of retained search professionals
- The usage of contingency search professionals
- Posting positions to online Job Boards
- The old fashioned career fairs
If you look at the eight bullet points above, one cannot help but notice 3 Internet driven recruiting techniques are growing, while the use of search professionals and job boards are decreasing. This is exactly the job seeking shift we’ve been talking about for the past year.
Do not fight these trends. Embrace the Internet as the emerging central platform for finding your next job faster. Build a strong online identity, use automated job search software and “Get caught”.
