RUN YOUR CAREER AS A BUSINESS

RUN YOUR CAREER AS A BUSINESS

For far too long, job seekers have tried finding positions with an approach that can only be compared to falling into some gigantic “Black Hole” in space. The Black Hole approach to job searching goes like this: You take a copy of a generic resume that’s been on your computer for years, tweak a word or two in the belief that you are giving it relevance, then visit the major Internet job boards to see how many job openings look like good possibilities. You spot a few, submit the generic resume (possibly with a cover letter) and then “wait it out” until a response comes in.

But the reality is this: 95% of the time a response doesn’t come in. The problem with this approach is that job seekers have become complacent and careless working on the assumption that an Internet job board, being nothing more than a piece of software sitting on a server somewhere in cyberspace, will accept your documents, evaluate them, pass them up the line for review if the match seems like a good one, and so on. But Internet job boards are not people. There is literally no opportunity for human interaction (e.g., dialog, questions, callbacks, follow-ups, etc…). That is both the primary flaw and inevitable failure of the so-called “Black Hole” approach.