TIme management during your unemployment can be difficult.  People think unemployed people have plenty of time.  Do we?  Want to know how to instantly get more out of the hours you devote to your job search?

Spend less time clicking and more time shaking hands.

If the bulk of your efforts are focused in the direction of online job boards, you’re misallocating resources. You’ll have much better luck if you dedicate yourself to maintaining regular connection with your network – and building your circle of contacts by meeting new people.

 

There are a number of reasons to avoid burning a lot of time online, such as:

 

• The vast majority of jobs are never posted.
Statistics vary, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 70%-80% of job openings never end up on the boards or in the want ads. If postings only represent a quarter of the available inventory, why spend an inordinate amount of time looking there?

 

• Some of the postings are outright fabrications.
These fictitious listings are designed to get you to give up personal information – think identity theft – or to solicit you for something if you respond.

 

• There is no job.
Similar to the bullet above, these are also postings that aren’t what they seem. They’re not designed to swipe your bank account number or sell you something – their purpose is to get your resume. These ads are designed to entice people to submit resumes in order to build databases.

 

• The ad is a composite.
This is another resume mining tactic. In this case, the posting you see combines a few positions that actually are available into one ad. The entity on the other end wants to get the most bang for their buck; they run a single ad to pull in the greatest number of resumes.

 

• Some of the postings are duplicates, though this may not be obvious to the reader.
For example, a single job could be posted on the hiring company’s site, on a job board, and on the sites of contingent recruiting firms that might be working on it non-exclusively. It’s probably a blind ad everywhere but the company site. Because it’s worded differently in each case, and the employer isn’t identified, you might think there are five openings when there’s only one.

 

• Some of the postings you’ll see are outdated; the job was filled.
Worse yet, the job might have been filled months ago. A company doesn’t want to have an empty “opportunities available” page, so they keep old information up. Or they’ve simply forgotten to update the page.

You can burn a lot of time online. It may feel like you’re accomplishing something, but in reality you’re probably not. Especially as the market becomes more competitive, it’s people who are going to make the difference in your search. Spend less time with the mouse and concentrate on interacting.

 

 

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