Knowing the Market

A modern job hunting campaign is by nature fairly involved. While the net has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and possible challenges for job hunters.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a highly personal, extremely aimed marketing operation where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network of contacts is your source for job leads.

So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job board and got over 650 applications in a week. For one position. That’s increased competition.

Had a strong candidate gotten ahold of us before we posted the ad, they could have gotten the position before running in to all that competition. How? By finding someone at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 12 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be careful to check your application materials thoroughly before submitting them. When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily taken out with a fast-paced triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By eliminating candidates whose cover letters gave us grounds not to hire them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating candidates whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over job hunters who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the great news is that job sites give you a feel of who is hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well honed resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.

Another issue to be aware of is how easily you can be checked out on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to tilt our thinking about who to employ.

AA-Careers provides a comprehensive set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.

Be careful out there, and good hunting!

Most recently the Federal Trade Commission has put forth their requests for further budget funding for fiscal year 2007 and in this report to Congress for more taxpayer’s monies the FTC cited their efforts to curb SPAM. Yet many critics of the agency who have called it everything from incompetent to the Blob of Bureaucracy believe that the FTC has done little since the CAN SPAM Act to enforce this unsolicited commercial email. Here is what the FTC told the US Congress:

SPAM.

“Experts have estimated that spam (unsolicited commercial email) costs businesses between $10 billion and $87 billion annually. Additionally, consumers spend countless hours each year dealing with spam. The CAN SPAM Act provides the FTC with tools to address this issue.”

Perhaps they have the tools to address the issue, yet SPAM has increased not decreased under their watch. Additionally the FTC cites another piece of information:

“In April 2005, the FTC and the California Attorney General brought an action to halt an operation that sent millions of illegal spam messages touting mortgage loans and other products and services. The FTC’s Adult Labeling Rule and the CAN.SPAM Act require commercial e-mailers of sexually-explicit material to use the phrase SEXUALLY EXPLICIT:” in the subject line of the e-mail message and to ensure that the initial viewable area of the message does not contain graphic sexual images.”

If in fact the State of California can take care of this, why are we doubling up and paying the FTC to work on it too? This duplication has to be costing the US Taxpayers millions of dollars, is it not? Meanwhile the FTC’s report goes on to state:

“In 2005, the FTC filed suit against a network of individuals and corporations that used spam to sell access to online pornography, and charged seven companies with violating the labeling requirements of the Rule and the Act. The spammers paid $691 000 to settle the charges and agreed to injunctive relief.”

But one case is not sufficient at all. There are thousands of spammers out there and this one case is not even a drop in the bucket, surely the agency with all this power and weight and self-aggrandizement can do better than this? Yet the FTC always falls back to the more safe position when asking for money from Congress and stated:

“The FTC also continued to work on the rulemaking and reporting requirements mandated by the CAN-SPAM Act. In June 2005, the FTC issued a report to Congress on the use of subject line labeling for commercial email as a means to reduce spam, concluding that such labeling would not be an effective way to curb spam. December 2005, the FTC issued a report to Congress on the effectiveness and enforcement of the CAN.SPAM Act. That report concluded that, while the Act has helped to deliver some improvements, passage of the U.S. SAFE WEB Act, continued education efforts, and improvements in anti-spam technology also are needed.”

And there you have it folks rather than telling the US Congress that the FTC is incompetent they tell them they need more of our money to finish a job that they are failing at. Meanwhile we have Yahoo and AOL planning their own way to make money sending us SPAM and the FTC is going to do nothing about it. Consider the this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

There are not many complaints about the Apple iPod, only one complaint often is oftentimes referred by iPod owners is the lack of ability to transfer iPod video from their iPod to a different computer. Though the iPod has no issues transferring content from a desktop computer to iPod with iTunes, the reversal is prohibited. Without iPod Transfer Software Package, you cannot transmit your iPod videos and songs to another machine. This matter oftentimes occurs when iPodders get a new personal computer or have to reinstall the operating system on their current PC. Apple prohibits this action because it doesn’t want unauthorised sharing of bought music from the iTunes marketplace. Notwithstanding, there are a plethora of honest scenarios that people need the ability to transmit from iPod to computer. If a personal computer dies and you need to reinstall the OS, you might need iPod to Computer copy software to recover your priceless files. Otherwise, the clean installation of iTunes will wipe out your iPod, possibly costing you lots of dollars in deleted music. An additional common situation individuals need these types of computer software is when they get a new personal computer and want to put their existing library of iPod content on the new machine. Again, without this type of package, you might potentially lose your worthful music. There are a lot of software companies that offer software applications to carry out this chore. A prompt visit to CNET or Tucows will reveal a lot of picks. You could also just type the phrase ‘iPod to personal computer transferring software’ into the search engine of your choice.