Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Please Hire Me - Your Resume, Geting Hired, Job Sites and Marketing Quackery

If you're currently out of work or feeling uncertain about your employment situation, the holidays and the end of the year can intensify the stress you're feeling. Faced with those stresses, looking for a project for the long holiday break, or simply seeking a way to quietly escape your extended family, you might find yourself locked away rewriting your resume. But there's one nagging problem with your plan -- how are you going to change it?

The resume is a funny creature. When you look at it, you can see the great story of your career history, but when you send it out, you're don't get hired for every job you apply for. And those recruiters, the big-game talent hunters, aren't beating down your door after finding your resume on one of those online job boards. There must be something wrong; maybe it's your resume. Or maybe we're all just a little biased when we're reviewing ourselves.

There's an industry that plays on these fears; they sell resume writing and job placement assistance. I'm not saying that there isn't a need to help people who don't write well (even those that do usually benefit from an editor), but like loan modification businesses, some of these businesses make their profits off of people in the most desperate circumstances. But is what they are selling really worth it?

I'm not a recruiter and I haven't been hired so frequently that I would consider myself an expert, but I do know marketing. And while there are some differences between the job market and a product market, the similarities are strong enough that you can apply the same strategy, analysis and evaluation criteria that you would use to measure your sales tools or marketing programs.

Initially, I thought this would just be a single post, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that this isn't a one-post topic. With that in mind, let's call this the end of the intro post.