Retrenched? Here's how to find work

Desperation among job seekers to find new posts is growing as companies freeze hires to cope with the global economic downturn. On average, the time it takes to find a new job has now stretched from six months to eight months. While South Africa's been slightly better shielded from job losses resulting from the international financial crisis, our unemployment in the first quarter of this year leapt 1.6% to 23.5%, with over 200 000 people losing their jobs. This is according to the latest Labour Force Survey (see article www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/168/35629.html).

Conversely, employers are struggling to find enough good people to fill specialist vacancies as business continues to grow over the long term. Too few people with the right mix of business, technology and professional know-how is creating a gap between the rising demand and inadequate supply of qualified people, which is turning the talent war into a permanent battle. According to former US Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, the top-10 in-demand jobs predicted for 2010 didn't exist in 2004, with educators currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.

This means there are many opportunities, both now and going forward, for talent with the right skills. The question is how to find these opportunities when none of the hundreds of CVs you've sent out to want ads, online job boards or recruitment agencies have elicited any response.

The problem is that many job seekers still exclusively rely on traditional job-hunting methods to get themselves in front of employers, which is no longer enough.

Recruitment ads a tick box

Newspaper recruitment classifieds, the first point of call for most job seekers, are often merely a legal tick-box for companies that are recruiting, having filled a position through an internal promotion or employee referral. Generalised job boards, while featuring jobs from many different companies, typically have a very low candidate response rate of about 3%, due to the tremendous volumes of CVs received for each position. Generalised recruitment agencies don't always have the expertise to match candidates and employers either, taking the job seeker a step further away from the employer than if they were to go straight to the source.

Traditional job-hunting methods provide a good base for employment search, especially to get an idea of who is hiring for what, but candidates have to do more to succeed. This means becoming more creative in their job-search strategies and going where employers are as the savvier companies are now trying out different tactics online.

The Internet provides opportunities

The Internet provides candidates with a powerful new collection of job-search techniques to reduce their time to hire. By enabling job seekers to quickly sift through mountains of irrelevant job postings with the right keywords and search tools, find new opportunities ahead of their competition and directly connect with employers to market themselves, Internet job search can dramatically improve the chances of an interview.

The starting point is to establish if you're employable in the first place. Do you have the right skills and experience required for a certain job? Do you have any shortfalls in your credentials you first need to solve with extra studies before being eligible for a position?

Secondly, candidates need to research opportunities and companies they want to target and prepare their personal marketing collateral. Some companies are using increasingly sophisticated filtering technology to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant job seekers. Most candidates still don't understand the concept of employers using keywords, phrases and concepts as part of the CV-vetting process. This means, when compiling a CV, candidates need to use terminology that the employer will be looking for - for example, in sales, listing SharePoint CRM experience.

Lastly, candidates need to submit their CVs through the relevant process and network their way into the company, in person and through online platforms.

The Internet isn't a magic cure to finding a job, but a resource that when used in the right combination with other job-hunting tools, can help tip the scales.

Five Internet resources for a winning job search include the following:

1. Career websites

Career sections on company websites provide job seekers with a list of current job openings, specific instructions on how to apply, and an overall feel for the company's culture. This gives candidates direct access to hiring managers, while offers are more likely to be current than on the big job boards. Employers benefit from access to a private pool of candidates that don't cost anything to acquire. Sites can vary widely from company to company based on their vendor - from very sophisticated to barely functional.

Job seekers should identify the companies they want to work for, look at what kind of skills they require, and visit their career websites to submit their CVs. If the website has the functionality, provide your personal information in a way that will match job adverts and interest employers, optimising your CV with keywords and phrases. Highlight key successes and capabilities. Tailor the information according to the opportunity you're targeting.

2. Social networks

Social networks such as Linkedin (www.linkedin.com), Twitter (www.twitter.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com) provide job seekers and employers with great new opportunities to build relationships. The instant information sharing on these platforms enables job seekers to connect, network and start speaking to hiring managers about any job openings, or with employees to find out what it's like working for a company. Employers can similarly connect, build relationships and push out jobs to candidates.

Linkedin is becoming increasingly rich in functionality. Most recently, it added a feature so you can now search people, jobs and companies for free. Employers also have two new advertising opportunities that enable them to segment candidate profiles and target carefully selected prospects with pay-per-impression (CPM) or pay-per-click (PPC) job campaigns at very cost-effective rates, should they wish to place a job advert on Linkedin.

3. Job board aggregators

Aggregators are job boards that work a little bit like Google, searching many other job boards for job advertisements and then reposting them on their own site. With candidates otherwise having to trawl through several different job boards, aggregators save them valuable time while making it easier to keep track of what was sent to whom when applying for many jobs. For employers, it presents another opportunity to publish job alerts to new recruitment platforms that can expose job vacancies to greater numbers of people.

CareerJet (www.careerjet.co.za), SimplyHired (www.simplyhired.com), and TwitterJobSearch (www.twitterjobsearch.com) are a few of the popular job-board aggregators, providing candidates with one consolidated view of all the jobs relevant to your profile and skills in one convenient browser.

4. RSS feeds

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a format used by websites with constantly changing information to syndicate their content as news feeds. Instead of visiting each website individually, job seekers can subscribe to receive updates every time a new job is posted that corresponds to their profile and skills. RSS can also help employers save time and money with alerts each time a new, skills-relevant CV is uploaded.

A special feed-reader - typically browser-based - is needed to receive and display these RSS feeds. This can be GoogleReader (www.google.com/reader) or any another feed burner that lets you get job alerts directly from corporate career websites, job board aggregators and other sources.

5. Industry-specific job boards

Different to generalised job sites, niche job boards focus on a specific industry sector, which makes them more targeted and tend to carry more employer than recruiter job notices. While generalised job boards have traditionally sold companies on the idea that it's best to have the widest reach possible, less is in fact more with targeted sites enabling job seekers and employers to cut down on clutter and identify more relevant leads.

One example of a local industry-specific job board is BizCommunity (www.bizcommunity.com), which focuses on the media, marketing and advertising industry. (Bizcommunity.com has subsequently opened up its job board to a much wider range of sectors, but continues to provide targeting by means of an easily searchable, category-based database.- Editor)

Step-by-step tips to hunt down a job

1. Soul search - who do you want to work for, doing what?
2. Identify jobs available from which companies.
3. Create different flavours of CV according to the different kinds of positions you're applying for.
4. Populate the different forms in a company's corporate career website, related to each of the different positions you're applying for.
5. Optimise your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social-media profiles you may have. Research for hiring managers on these platforms.
6. Set up RSS feeds for those companies you want to hear from.
7. Set up a few other feeds from niche job boards, and aggregators (job searches managed from one place).
8. Check out job boards for a general idea of who's hiring for what.
9. Approach specialised recruitment agencies to be added to their databases (a top financial placement agency will have much greater relationships and ability to successfully place you at a blue-chip company, like Investec, than a generic recruitment agency.
10. Scour newspapers for companies who are not with the programme (research the organisation if you really want to work for them, call or do an online search for the marketing manager, and approach them).

For more information go to www.graylink.biz.