You have made a professional and attractive resume, now what?Come on, start applying but before that, know all the ways to find a job and apply for it.A few decades back, the best ways to look for a job were personal reference, searching through news papers or queuing up outside an employment exchange. But now, the time has changed. Things are faster and demand more effectiveness.With telecommunication and internet at peak, the ways to look for an ideal job are numerous, but don’t forget, so are the number of candidates per vacancy and this number is so large that it has transformed the interview process from being a process of selection to a process of selective rejection. Hence, it is extremely important to adopt a unique strategy for each channel of communication because “Theory of Preference” holds true here as well. The goal is to create a preference at every door so that when the opportunity knocks, you are the first one to open the door.If Opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door Milton Berle.It is true in the case of a job hunt because we really need to make doors and not just a single door because the opportunity, in this case, may knock on any door.
As put rightly by Thomas A. Edison, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Building doors is a continuous work until the goals are achieved.So let’s be obedient to what these wise men said and start building the doors.Door 1: The biggest and the best door is ‘Personal Reference’.Current hiring scenario is not only tedious but highly confusing not only for the candidates but for the employers as well. The cost of wrong recruitment is higher than the cost of recruitment which in itself is pretty high. So employers are also looking for avenues and resources which are highly cost efficient as well as assure high performance thus lowering the cost of recruitment as well as reducing the risk of wrong recruitment. Internal employee reference just offers that and that’s why every company is promoting employee referral scheme.Door 2: Second in line is ‘Job Portals’.Now, when I write Job Portals, I actually mean job postings as well as resume posting in the portals’ databases like naukri, monster and many others. Most companies as well as the recruitment consultants choose to search in portals’ databases as the first step towards candidate search because of the comprehensiveness of the information provided and the easy use of software system to aid in first level filtering, but there is a difference in simple submitting your resume and wisely using the system to your advantage. Next step would be the job posting but it would be more relevant to discuss in the category where it actually belongs.Door 3: Next door opens at the office of ‘Recruitment Consultant’.Bridging the gap between the recruiter and the job applicants, recruitment consultants play a pivotal role in taking you close to your dream, but they are overloaded, by work as well as resumes and all this makes them highly self-centered. It is extremely important to understand the correct way to deal with consultants because the same channel, meant to facilitate you, if not managed properly, can become the biggest impediment in your path to success.Door 4: We still have ‘Newspapers’.This door is clearly the oldest door available but only used by companies in case of either extremely large number of openings or walk-in interviews. In case of walk-ins, I will be taking up a special walk-in article soon but in case of application of jobs advertised in News Papers, it is extremely important to understand the requirements first, else the entire exercise may go waste, both for the candidate as well as the employer.
Door 5: Don’t forget the ‘Social Networking Websites’ – Fastest emerging “would be biggest” door.This is a new door, created only a few years ago. This door however, is a path full of landmines, but once successfully the path is crossed, it has unlimited opportunities with long term advantages. This door not only takes time to be built but also to open up and it requires loads of hard work, patience and endurance. Learning to use it to your advantage is something that you must do otherwise it may cause a disaster.The biggest buzz comes from doing it all at once, regularly monitoring the performance, and emphasizing the ones that yield the most, however, in this case, not completely ignoring the other ones.So don’t wait, take inputs from my articles and start building doors because, opportunity may be looking for the one to knock upon.Good Luck.Vaibhav Gupta