Job Search Advice Has To Change To Fit The Current Recession

This recession is like none our country has seen in decades. Hiring is way down at the same time as layoffs are up. There is hiring going on but it is cautious.

SENDING PEOPLE TO INTERNET JOB SITES
Advising anyone to center their job search on the Internet is clearly a bad idea. The Conference Board issues a compre-hensive monthly report on Internet job listings. In November 2009, there were 2.2 advertised vacancies for every 100 people in the labor force – a slight rise since October (2.1 advertised vacancies per 100).

“Since April, when labor demand bottomed, monthly gains can only be described as sluggish,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. “We have yet to see a significant increase in employers’ demand for labor, and, until we see job openings pick up, it will be hard to bring down the unemployment rate. The gap between the number of unemployed and the number of advertised vacancies is about 12.3 million, with 4.8 unemployed for every online advertised vacancy.”

A RETURN TO 'OLD SCHOOL' JOB SEARCH IS MOST EFFECTIVE
When companies post job listings, they are getting inundated with responses that have to be processed. To avoid that, most companies have aggressively fallen back to the pre-Internet practices of first going to staff for recommendations and then checking the resumes they have on file.

This puts a premium on networking and targeted cold calling to put resumes on file. A person advising a person on job search should focus on helping their client effectively structure and maintain a sustained networking effort (covered extensively in Job Coach Reports) as well as maintaining a structured plan for locating businesses that staff their occupation that can be targeted for resumes (also covered in Job Coach Reports). The key to getting a job in a tough hiring environment is having yourself out there and following up. It's frustrating and hard work... but it does get jobs.

RESUMES NEED TO CHANGE IN EMPHASIS AS WELL AS CONTENT
With the resume pile for each position so much deeper than in the past, the effective resume has to directly speak to the concerns of the person reading it which is the bottom line--- the company's productivity.

Resumes prepared by professionals don't speak of tasks done in a work career. They talk about accomplishments. They talk about responsibilities and authority. Even the lowest position in a business has all three of these. Every person who has worked in the past can talk about why s/he is more productive than the next person who did the same job.

The Job Coach helps its users articulate their prior productivity in the final table with the data presented in the Job Coach Report in the Interviewing More Effectively section. This table could also be used to draft a far more effective resume as well because it speaks the direct language of the person hiring; the language of work character, productivity and accomplishment. Anyone can produce a resume that guides the person reading to project their productivity in the reader's work setting--- giving their resume a leg up on other resumes.