The Mirage of Online Job-Seeking
Volume I
Long gone are the days of the classified ad, where people would scan the newspaper looking for open jobs in their area. Most ads would include a short job description, location, and a contact phone number for a job seeker to call and talk to someone to express interest in the job. That is clearly no longer the case as the advent of the internet has revolutionized every aspect of society and the way business is done. Most newspapers have either shut down or transitioned to online publication to maintain readership.
Technology is moving at perhaps the most rapid pace ever, and it has allowed us all to do a great deal of work and even entire jobs without ever needing to leave the comforts of our home office. While the goal is not only to make things simpler, it is supposed to make things better. As it relates to the hiring industry, the question needs to be asked – has it? Years ago you simply read an ad, made a call, scheduled an interview, and got a Yes or No, often on the spot. How many steps do we take now to do the same thing? How much does it cost? How long do we wait? Why did I need to provide so much information to some online website that is not the one I’ll be working for, but the one who may or may not pass me along to the company I’m interested in? All of these are questions will run through your mind once you experience utilizing the most popular job sites on the internet. If it is not your first rodeo, you have no doubt found yourself asking these questions, and feeling powerless to do anything about it, or do much any differently. That modicum of success you will sometimes find is sometimes enough to at least tolerate the system you used to find it, but is something you are unlikely to celebrate or promote to others. Yet it is the same system used by just about every one of the biggest job boards you will find online.
When that time comes and you either need, or you want, a new job, the tact most people take is the same. You may do a search via Google or another engine for ‘Jobs’ and all of the big players in the industry are listed right at the top. Or thanks to the many commercials that fill your radio and tv stations, and your web browsers repeatedly, you need not even do a general search, because you already have an idea where to go. Most people don’t go to just one, but to multiple sites, believing the odds improve by casting a wider net. That is not a bad strategy, as no user really knows where their next landing spot will be, nor where their future employer may have posted that perfect role they’re looking for. Let’s examine the process used by most of the biggest job sites today.
You are Looking for a New Job or Next Career Step:
The first few job sites most people check out online are the most visited, and most popular, investing heavily in commercials across all media platforms. You likely check most of them out, begin to use them, set up a profile, and upload a resume and bio, believing that this must be the right move with all of the right people doing the same thing, right? Of course, it is worth noting, and should be a bit concerning, that right up front you find yourself positioned as a ‘needle’, one as unlikely as the next to ever be found in some theoretical ‘haystack’. But then you think ‘I have to start somewhere I guess…Why not where everyone else is going? Soon enough you have signed in with an email address, super easy, and your job search can begin! Well, not yet…There is some work to do first.
- Register: To use most sites, and find and apply for jobs, you need to be a site member, which means you first give away your name, email, and other contact info to begin.
- Profile: You create a profile that requires sharing extensive personal data: Name, Address, Phone/Mobile#, Work History, Education Level, and Experience, as well as some who ask for additional personal information like your status for Immigration, Veteran, and Disability. This is all in addition to the Resume/CV and Photo for your profile. It comes out well-formatted, looks professional, and makes an individual feel they are well-represented. And while that may look great, it is a significant amount of information to give away simply to get permission to click the ‘Apply’ button. Should it lead to contact from a company, you will have to provide all of the same personal information again directly to said company. Why was it necessary to share it all with the job site, the third party, whose only role is showing Job Seekers available jobs and Hiring Managers available talent? But, it is not questioned nearly enough as everyone plays by the same rules, colors within the lines, crosses their fingers, and hopes for the best!
- Job Search: You see many companies out there, more than you realized, even within your own industry. You also see large-scale companies outside your direct industry that have multiple organizations that call for your skills and abilities. You can fairly easily dig in and find out most of what you need to know to determine if a job and company is for you. From the products and services a company makes and sells to consumer and employee reviews, your research will give you a clearer picture of what is inside the glossy book cover.
- You will also want to inspect the length of time a job has been listed. Seldom is an opportunity listed beyond thirty days still open and available. Whether a company neglects to remove it, replace it, or has left it to collect and build its database of prospective talent, it is one that most serious job seekers know to let pass by.
- While it can be easy to get lost in the sea of opportunities found, it is important to stay vigilant. If not, the eager job seeker can find themselves over-applying, believing they should cast as wide a net as possible to increase their chances of landing the job. Remember that these actions, the jobs you apply to, and the people you network with, will lead to some of the most important life decisions you may ever make. Taking a disciplined approach, researching, and applying with intent and purpose, through which you will see it is not a ‘limitless’ amount of opportunities out there, but a far shorter list of genuine open roles at real companies that are looking for talented people who do what you do.
So far, it seems simple and straightforward enough, and leaning on the belief that because it has been the long-established system of hiring and job-finding, it must be effective. You keep coming back to the same thought. If this is where all of the people and all of the companies choose to go, and all march to this same beat, who am I to question? Let’s press on!
- The Land of Make-Believe: You will find many jobs that look perfect on the surface, yet through a good amount of research you are entirely unclear about what the company does, or if it is a real company at all. After reading and re-reading the curious verbiage, you become increasingly clear that you may not be looking at a company in your industry, but a recruiting agency that has either been hired by such a company or knows there is a market for finding people like you. Just like applying to a company that has the role you want, they will take your resume and information and then do what you intended to do when you hit apply in the first place. The only difference is that the recruiting agency will get paid for that action, whereas you will hopefully just get the job. And in the process, now three companies have all of your personal information for the single job you were trying to apply for.
- Some, not all, may also share your resume with many other companies they contract with who have similar roles open, any of which they will receive a commission for simply introducing you to that company, and even more if you are hired. Thus, your information is now in the hands of the Job Site you signed up with, the recruiting agency, and every company they may send it to, and you will likely never know just what that number is.
- None of this is intended to slight good recruitment firms, many of which are the right way to go about finding what you’re looking for, and that applies to companies looking for talent as well. But those firms who present themselves as doing everything across many industries with a wide range of jobs and expertise, making it almost impossible to determine that they actually are representing other companies who do those things does not project the transparency most of us look for.
- Application: Each time you find a job worth pursuing after having done your research and are feeling good about how well you match up with the listed qualifications, you press that Apply button. You can feel the adrenaline rush as you wonder if this is the one that the person on the other end is going to take one look at and call to bring you in immediately. If you have ever played roulette, you plunk your money on a number and wait for that ball to land. Those moments between placing your chips on your number and the ball finding its final destination are simply ‘Magical’. You won, you lost, you played for ten minutes or two hours – all of it is forgettable. But we never forget what gives us ‘The Rush’. When looking for a job, putting our chips on the table by hitting ‘Apply’, fuels some of that same fire that burns inside us. We haven’t lost yet, so we can still win, and we all love the adrenaline rush. The Wonder, Possibility, and Anticipation – the Optimist’s Cocktail, and we’re going to get drunk on it!
- Some, not all, may also share your resume with many other companies they contract with who have similar roles open, any of which they will receive a commission for simply introducing you to that company, and even more if you are hired. Thus, your information is now in the hands of the Job Site you signed up with, the recruiting agency, and every company they may send it to, and you will likely never know just what that number is.
(Of course, the odds at Roulette are about 38:1, slightly better than today’s average job-search odds)
Most job seekers, like most companies, do what seems logical when vetting out the other before making a final decision. That is the smart thing to do. By the same token, how often do we also vet the online platform we are using to help us make that decision? As we consider making such an important business, and life decision, we should do as much diligence on the system we’ll use to find the right company, as we do on the company itself. As part of your due diligence, look to create partnerships with the right people, companies, and systems that will provide the clearest, smartest path to help you achieve your goals. Check out all of the reviews online – Trust Pilot is one for example, and there are many others that do a deeper dive than the average person hiring or seeking an opportunity can do. There you will see first-hand the experience of users who have gone through much of what we have detailed here and are all too willing to share not only the experience but what they led them to do differently. There is a new system that is redefining the way to go about finding jobs and connecting people. It is Careereon.
Having experienced first-hand the pitfalls and illusions that the hiring system online offers, we are building a different system that is simplistic and transparent, ensuring you will never have to jump through hoops or give away all of the personal information you’ve been accumulating since birth to use it. Careereon is not a job site, but a Community. We are bringing People Together with a mission to reframe what hiring means. Whether you’re seeking a new role, or have a role to fill in your company, the only way this happens successfully is by connecting the only two people that matter in the hiring person – the Candidate and the Hiring Manager. No algorithms or filters exist that can accurately ‘weed out’ people or companies for the other. It is not our place, nor that of any other career or job-focused online site, to make those decisions for people. We offer a community where Job Seekers connect with Companies and vice versa – simple as that.
The Careereon System:
- Sign Up: Fill Out the Simplest Profile you will find, one that asks for the least amount of information needed to get you connected with companies immediately.
- Tell Your Story: As part of our Professionals Community, you create a video to share with companies hiring who you are, what you do, and the type of company, job, and culture you seek
- Our Business Community members go to our video gallery to see and meet the people they are looking to hire in an Up Close & Personal Way possible. Resumes are fine, but telling your story is far more powerful.
- Start Connecting: That’s it – that’s all you need to do to get going and start seeing and meeting the people who make the decisions to hire and grow their teams and companies.
- We provide a link to your personal sites or social media so companies are able to get to quickly get to know you and reach out to connect further.
Careereon also has a rich, robust Jobs Section where you are invited to view thousands of jobs from every industry, and look for the companies in our Business Community video gallery.
‘Work Smarter not Harder’ is a common phrase in business, and is as true of the Hiring Industry as it is in life. Join Careereon and together we will deliver a better system that works for its members, putting the power back in the hands of people who no longer have to navigate through a maze of superficiality that plays on the emotions and hopes of people who need people. We offer a Better, Simpler, Effective way to do that at no cost to our Job Seeking Community. Join us, Tell Your Story, and begin connecting with the companies you are interested in on Day 1!
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