Ending Your Addiction to Job Boards

JOB BOARDS ARE OVERWHELMING

Spend 30 minutes on the job boards and you end up feeling as if you’ve spent 30 minutes in the spin cycle in your washing machine. Being whirled between feeling exhilarated from all the amazing opportunities at your fingertips and exasperated because these job descriptions have so many requirements a rocket scientist from NASA would have a hard time qualifying. Let’s throw in a double dose of ghosting and it’s enough to drive you nuts!

Job boards serve a purpose and almost everybody uses them incorrectly. Here are three rules to live by that will not only take you out of the spin cycle but give you fast and fun ways to use them to your advantage.

1. 70% of resumes are discarded and never seen by human eyes through the various Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and very few will send you a no thank you response letting you know you’ve hit the reject pile. Give yourself a fighting chance when you submit your resume by putting your resume AND LinkedIn profile through optimization tools like Cultivated Culture and Jobscan before submitting your resume.

2. Fun fact: If you’re over the age of 30 you have less than a 10% chance of landing a job through online postings. Most managers have an idea of who they want to hire before the job even gets posted so it should come as no surprise that you get ghosted on the majority of your submissions. You should use job boards for research and then work your network to get introduced to the company so you can talk to the people who are making the hiring decisions.

3. 30% of the job requirements are not really necessary. These job requisitions are typically not written by the person doing or hiring for the job and by the time they get done adding in all the things they made need “just in case” you’ve got a bloated job description that virtually no one will qualify for on paper. The general rule of thumb – is if you’ve got at least 70% of what they’re asking for… go for it!

Pro tip: Make sure you subtly add in the things you know they need and can’t openly ask for. You’ll never see “must be able to deal with extremely difficult and demanding people” in a job description but you know that’s an important skill to have, you should find a creative way to say it.

According to the World Economic Forum, 41% of people are strongly considering changing jobs right now. Do you know what that means? OPPORTUNITY!!!! With this massive game of musical chairs going on right now, opportunities are everywhere.

Whether you’re actively looking for a job, on the fence, or happily employed, you should always be ready for your next big thing. 81% of people stay in a job they don’t love because job hunting is a total hassle.

It doesn’t have to be soul-crushing.

What if it wasn’t so hard?

What if it didn’t take so long?

What if you could actually have fun job hunting and land a job that has you excited to leap out of bed every Monday morning?

If you are ready to get off the sidelines or want to be ready in case the perfect opportunity finds you, we have experts ready to help.