Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

It’s Monday and since I was out last week (I still blogged) I want to treat you to a very important post. I’ve been thinking about relationships for the past few months and even at the time when I was applying for jobs. Believe it or not, the future recruitment is in relationships, not resume submissions. I’ve learned that through networking, you can skip steps in recruitment, as well as become recruited based on your personal brand. I used to apply for jobs the old fashion way and it took months, but now it takes no time because I know people.
I look back and laugh at the volume of resumes I sent and the lack of results. With blogging and social networks, I feel I’ll never have to apply or interview for another job again. People know me from what I’ve produced and that’s the real value and human interaction needed to be a part of any company.  To bond with new people who have opportunities waiting for you is what will make you successful.

The days of applying to jobs through corporate websites and job listing repositories will end. As the competition to get jobs increases year over year, the amount of resumes and cover letters HRM’s (Human Resource Management Systems) will hold will overflow and even crawlers won’t be able to save them. When you have a million resumes, and a crawler finds certain keywords, there will still be too many leftover, meaning they will have to interview a larger batch.  This costs HR more money and the applicant more time.

When I was applying for both internships in jobs, over a four year span, only a small fraction of my submissions turned into interviews and even fewer job offers. I had no network or understanding of how to bypass these dumb systems that left me in the black hole.

Online Recruitment has 2 Faces

• 1:Many - When you tackle recruitment with this face, you are submitting your resume and cover letter to corporate sites, such as HP and Viacom (listed below), and job banks, such as Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com. Do you really know where your materials are going? I do! They are landing in a repository with thousands of other resumes for the same job, which are usually tossed aside when people have connections for that same job. One way to spend countless hours, days and months in your job search is by using this traditional method. Most jobs aren’t even listed on these websites anyways, but rather set internally for special positions that pay more, have more benefits and a better title.

• 1:1 – Companies and people want to hire people who they know, trust and respect. 1:Many fails because there is no human element. I’ve had friends who’ve gotten jobs within a few weeks, without taking a single interview because of the strength of their network. With either an online or offline network, you can tap into people who either already know who you are or know of you from someone else they respect. The future of online recruitment is in 1:1 relationships, where you find people online, through social networks or blogs and form a relationship through mutual interest and a job opportunity is created. Through the power of web 2.0, it’s fairly easy to perform some searches and find people who work at either Fortune 500 companies or small firms. Your conversation might be around what it’s like to work at their company or the topic they write about on their blog. If you’ve built your brand online, they can quickly inspect you without you even saying a word to know if you’d be a good match for their company. If you focus 100% of your job search energy on meeting new people, then the probability that you’ll land a job will drastically increase, as well as your social circle and livelihood.

The truth is that people hire people. You can’t stand out if you’re another line in a recruiting database or if you just have a resume. In today’s world, you need the personality and other differentiating elements to be in the right pile; the job offer pile.

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