The Internet can be a powerful tool for job-seekers, but like all good power tools, it should be used with caution.

Here are my tips for online job-hunters:

• Applying for several jobs can get confusing. Make a list of jobs you have applied for, so that when your phone starts ringing hot you will know who you are talking to and what job they are calling about. First impressions count at this point, and confusion can be mistaken for poor organisational skills or even incompetence.

• It is usually impossible to speak with either a recruitment consultant or a company representative when applying online. You simply click and apply with your fingers crossed! But if you can, try to speak with someone about the job in the very early stages of your application. Ideally you need to chat with the recruitment consultant acting on behalf of the company. This allows you to be much more candid in asking the kinds of questions that will help you decide if this is the right place for you.

• Make informed choices about where you list your CV.With the prevalence of new online job boards, the option to upload your CV and register to have suitable job opportunities emailed to you is very appealing. But remember that your current employer might access your details too!

• Make sure your personal information is not on display. We recently viewed a CV listed on a job board and among the applicant’s personal details were his tax file no and bank account numbers! Of course we contacted him immediately and advised him to delete this information pronto. He could have found himself the victim of identity fraud – or worst still, he could have lost his life-savings.

We were interested to discover some statistics about job searching recently, which suggested that most job-hunters expect to find their next position via an online job board, with recruitment agencies coming in as the second most likely source, and newspapers third.

However, in our experience, newspaper ads are more successful for company’s filling positions than online ads. This suggests to me that clever job-seekers are still checking the paper as well as searching online.

So don’t dismiss newspaper job sections as old hat - they have real benefits and avoid the pitfalls listed above. And if you let a good recruitment agency search both online and print media on your behalf to find the perfect match for you, you are far more likely to end up in your dream job.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 3:57 pm and is filed under recruitment, dream job, jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.