The reason you can’t find a job is pretty simple. But it’s not for the reason you probably imagine.
Most job seekers who ask us to help them find a job think they know why their job search has been unsuccessful.
Young people – I do not have experience.
Born overseas – I do not have local experience.
Females – They think I will get pregnant and leave to have a baby.
Older workers – I am overqualified or too old.
Disabled – They want an able-bodied person.
Former model – I am too good looking
But it is more likely that their job application was never opened or that the job was filled before their application was received.
Most job vacancies attract hundreds of applicants – all with one common message – “I need a job”.
Consider the poor employer who is faced with an inbox of equally-brilliant applications. They are not necessarily going to compare each and every one of them. It’s like a son buying flowers for his mother on Mother’s Day. Some will compare every bunch in the shop. Others will buy the first ones they see as long as the colour matches their taste.
When it comes to jobs, the two most likely scenarios are that if you are applying for a job in a small or medium-sized company it is more likely that your application won’t even be opened. If an employer gets 100 applications they will most likely open 10 or 15 and find that a third of these are acceptable and call three or four in for an interview.
It does not matter how good you are the fact is that most jobs are pretty easy and can be done by a large number of the applicants. So the employer does not need to wade through 100 resumes to find a suitable candidate.
In other cases the job ads that job seekers may have applied to may be fake job ads. Many recruitment agencies place fake job ads simply to collect details of job seekers. They want a large database so that they can run around to employers claiming to already have a high number of candidates looking for work. This improves the chances of the recruitment agency getting the contract and making more money by adding to the misery of unsuspecting job seekers.
Other fake job ads are posted by any number of marketing companies trying to capture job seekers’ details so that they can sell them products or services such as courses and resumes.
If you really need a job then using the correct strategy will increase your chances dramatically.
The director of The Job Factory (www.thejobfactory.com.au) Craig Binnie says it could take job seekers as little as 5 minutes to secure an interview if they are smart about how they search for a job.
“If job seekers looking for a job just wait until a job ad appears on the internet they could be searching for months and still not get a job,” Mr Binnie says.
“We help people find jobs before they are advertised and it is a lot easier than people think.
“If someone wants an accounting job, for example, we will send their details to hundreds of potential employers in search of a job. We don’t wait until jobs are advertised. We find them for our clients before anyone else hears about these jobs
“If our clients are the only ones who are interviewed they will probably get the job and it will never be advertised. It is madness to wait until a job is advertised and then compete with 100 others to try to get it.”
