The Changing Job Market
When I started recruiting (back when dinosaurs walked the Earth), getting a job was a pretty simple matter. There were jobs everywhere, seemingly way more jobs than there were people. A lot of these jobs could be found in your local Sunday newspaper. You would type your resume and send it in via snail mail. Whereas one resume was supposed to fit all back then, the resume itself was a constant pain if you mistyped a word or made a grammatical error because you would have to redo it.
Next came the era of the beginning of the Internet and all of the job boards that came with it: Monster, Headhunter.net, Career Mosaic, K-Force (yes folks, they started as a job board), Hot Jobs, CareerBuilder and a myriad of others. Eventually, they spawned aggregate boards such as Indeed and Simply Hired. With most of these models you would search the job boards in the same way that you would search your Sunday paper or either post your resume and hope and pray that someone would call you.
You can still post your resume today and check the job boards for potential jobs, but that model is fading fast. Actually, you can still search the Sunday newspapers, but more than likely, you’ll be through that in less than a minute. Social networking is forcing its way into our lives and perhaps the biggest force in social networking as it related to employment in Linked-In, or as I like to refer to it, as the Professional Facebook.
Linked-In also has their own brand of job postings and recruiters all over the world use Linked-In by looking at members’ working profiles. Resumes are still extremely important and vital, but now you must find a way to break through the clutter of sending in your resume to a posting because more times than not, you just become another resume in the pile or simply a number. Person to person contact is becoming essential. Whereas emailing can be good, a phone or voicemail is even better. EVERYONE send emails, but not as many people interact via phone.
Calling a company about a position that is posted on their website and asking to speak to the contact shows ambition and initiative, which is what is needed in today’s job market. Calling someone and either having a brief conversation or leaving a voicemail is a way to separate yourself from the hordes of people sending in their resumes. You will still probably be asked to send your resume in, but now the hiring contact will be aware that it is being sent in and will look for it specifically.
You must be able to adjust to the changes in the job market. Just like a football team that goes into the locker room trailing at halftime needs to make adjustments to their game in order to win in the second half, you need to look around and adjust in order to be relevant. If a hiring contact is not named, research and call around until you find that contact and then call them. Be aggressive. This change in style may not fit your personality, but stepping out of character will help you grow professionally and personally.
Hebrews 11:1
