Resume Tips and Career Advice

It's easy to get frustrated with job hunting online. So many postings and applications to keep track of, and most of the time you never even hear back. Just remember that online applications do in fact work. They're not always fast or easy, but they may just be the ticket to your next job.

It will likely take more effort than a couple of submissions, but if you effectively use your personal network, and make sure you are qualified for each job, you stand a good chance at landing a job online.

Here are 5 great tips for successfully landing a job online:

Tip #1. Try to make a connection within the company you are applying to.

• Exercise your personal network to get an internal reference or find out what is going on with the job online.
• Connect with some local staffing firms to see if they work with the company on a contract or permanent basis.

If you're looking for a job, you probably see hundreds of job postings online every day. Considering people continue to lose their jobs every day as well, this doesn't make much sense. If you've submitted your resume to many of these postings, I'm sure you share the sentiment that many of my candidates do. "Should I really even mess with submitting my resume to online job postings?"

The answer to this question is yes, but there are some important things to keep in mind before you do:

• Many postings are automatically populated to the web from staffing firm web sites, or corporate web sites. What this means is, some of the positions may be closed or "dummy postings" for companies to network with candidates for jobs they see on a regular basis.
• Some companies are required, by law, to pursue every avenue available to hire a qualified candidate. This means they must internally post a job and post it for the public to view, before they can hire anyone for a specific position. Consequently, a hiring manager may have to post a job for a required amount of time, even though they have already identified someone to hire for a newly created opening.

Many companies hire directly off the postings they post online, and many staffing companies do in fact have the positions that they post as well, so don't be completely discouraged by postings online. This info is useful to explain why you might not hear anything back from those countless submissions.