What is the best job search strategy? Should you send out thousands of applications or should you focus on just a few? The internet has provided the opportunity to blast your résumé or CV out to thousands of sites with one click of the mouse, but is this an effective way to find a job? And is it worth paying for?

It is true that you sometimes need to send out quite a few job applications before you finally get the job you want, but will sending the same résumé or CV to 9000 email addresses actually get you the job you want?

And are all of the employers who receive your résumé looking for the same things? I doubt it.

And just how many of those employers are actually going to read your résumé? Employers are known to glance at a résumé for approximately ten seconds before they go on to the next one in the pile. If they don’t see what they are looking for in that time, the résumé is consigned to the bin.

And exactly what are they looking for? They are searching for someone who meets the requirements set out in the job description or online advertisement. So do you really think they will read a pile of résumés from people who haven’t even read the job description or looked at the advertisement? The reality is that in many situations, your résumé will end up in a database and might be scanned at some stage in the future if the company is looking for workers who can fulfill some basic, general functions.

If you are looking for a specialized job in a career where you can carve out a decent future for yourself, you need to know exactly what you are applying for, what skills you’ll need and the type of training and promotion you can hope to achieve.

And you can only do this by targeting your résumé or CV for every job you apply for. This might sound like a lot of work, but if you do it properly, you’ll be hired much more quickly.

The truth is that you only need one job, but it needs to be the right job. In order to find it, you have to decide what you want, find out who is offering it and then prove to them that you can do the job better than the other candidates. You won’t achieve this by blasting out résumés to thousands of people.

The best job search strategy is to be very focused, build a network of contacts who can help you and create an outstanding résumé or CV and cover letter for each employer.

Article Source: Waller Jamison, EzineArticles.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.