Finding Jobs Is Easy With These 5 Quick Career Hunting Tactics

If you’ve been out of the job market for more than four or five years, the world has changed. Even if it’s only been a couple years, the job hunting world is completely different. As a matter of fact, with these five quick career hunting tips in mind, you’ll be able to cut through the mess, and figure out what are the best ways to go about finding new positions.

There be jobs over yonder!

Things have changed, the people you know have changed, and the methods have changed. You don’t necessarily need to keep on top of everything, but when you enter back into the job market, it is important to go with the most effective paths to a new job possible. Let’s talk about these five tips.

1. Submit to Your Targets

A lot of the job submission sites will be either scraped data (automatically copied without human involvement) from a company website, or from recruiters that are working with other companies to double-post or re-market some of the positions they have on their company websites. I say, forget all those.

If you know which company you want to work for say, within a 15 mile radius of your house or so, create a short list of those 10, 15, or 20 companies. Just go directly to their career websites. You can either set up a job search agent to send you emails or just say, “hey, I’m going to check these five this week, these five next week, these five week the week after, and these five the last week of the month.” And just repeat until you find what you need.

I say this is a useful tactic because a lot of times I’ll see errors in some of the other sites that are either scraping or collecting data and putting it in a single spot. Sometimes the bad data was something as important as the actual location of the building. I mean, we’re talking a different town here folks. I’ve also seen some of submission requirements be wrong, too.

If you spend thirty minutes to an hour submitting a job on one of those sites and it turns out you didn’t even do one of the things that was requested, congratulations, you wasted your time and will not be selected. So, go straight to the source.

2. Call Your Targets

A lot of times you can find some of this contact information on the job postings or maybe even a LinkedIn profile. I wouldn’t dig too far into some of the social ways, unless it’s clear the person wants to be contacted. But if you can get your hands on a hiring manager, the HR representative that is responsible for this position, or anyone that is within an area relevant to that position, then it’s best to find a time that’s available for them.

Get a feel for what’s on the market, what’s coming up, and have an idea of positions open in the future, if some aren’t open already. By getting this kind of inside track, you’re not only being very vocal and apparent to the company that you’re interested in, which is a beautiful thing, you will usually get information about a posting before it hits any of the other websites out there.

3. Hit the Main Stream Listing Sites

You’re going to have to hit the mainstream sites at some point in time, and there are some apps out there that do a decent job: Jobrio and indeed.com are two good examples. These can be good because if you’re waiting in line, pop on there, see what’s available, and save or star it for later. Then when you get back to your computer, go over to the actual company website and fill it out there.

This is you leveraging your free time to find what’s available and to react as quickly as possible, because sometimes every second counts. You might have to resort to some of the big sites, but that’s okay, just make sure you know what you’re aiming for.

Whether it’s the industry specific site like tech company specific, engineering specific, oil and gas specific, or government specific; make sure you’re aiming at the right spot. And a quick Google search finds just about whatever you need in this arena, things have come a long way. (try this in Google: +”MY TAREGT INDUSTRY” +jobs)

4. Ask Family and Friends to Probe

I for one don’t enjoy this because I really don’t like to feel like I’m pressuring and putting my friends and family on the line. And there’s been research that shows, a lot of times friends and family will say, “Yes,” they will help, but it’s not entirely successful because of how close they are to you.

What you can do that has been shown to be very helpful, is to find those just outside the friend or family circle and are more the ‘acquaintance’ or ‘friend of friends’ that you met one or two times only. Those people usually will end up being useful points of contact for positions that come up.

Now you probably kept up with these people on Facebook, or one or two tiers away on LinkedIn, or maybe meet and greet every once in a while at a friends’ party, which is perfect. Bring it up after a couple niceties and you’ll probably have a really good chance at getting the inside scoop.

5. Always Be Persistent

Some days are just going to be completely crappy. Nothing’s going to pop up on the main websites, none of your friends, or family, or acquaintances are going to call, the job postings on main sites aren’t going to work and be anything that you want, and people just won’t be answering your phone calls. It happens. And I would hazard to guess that it happens more often than not.

Just know that the right thing will come for you when it’s time. Don’t lose hope. Just stay focused and know that every little bit of effort you put into it, is effort that you put into it. Don’t attach yourself to the results; attach yourself to the effort that you put into it.

You submitted one? Great! Write it down, write the date, write who you submitted it to, the time involved – these are little check marks that you can look at later and say, “Hey, I didn’t waste that time. I tried, I put this in there and I should be proud about that. It is me gaining more experience in this process that I can use later.” Focus on the positive aspects; it really does matter.

Use Your Job Hunting Tactics Today

Finding a job really doesn’t have to be as hard as most people think. If you can really just boil down the focus of your efforts to five main sources of positions and interview opportunities, you’ll be that much more focused in your plan.

Submit to your direct companies; the companies that you’re targeting. Call your targets, hit those mainstream listing sites when you have to, check with your friends of friends, and acquaintances. Always, always, know that every little bit you can do is useful and stay on the up and up. Really take a deep and heartfelt effort to keep these things in mind. You will eventually run across opportunities to speak with someone that knows you’re a good fit and then you’ll have you’re opportunity to prove it.