Employers Ignoring You? Build A Web Site Telling Them Why They Should Hire You.
Talk with any job seeker for more than a few minutes and you’ll hear horror story after horror story about how they can’t get their resumes noticed by employers. Many employers refuse to extend the most basic courtesy of an automated email acknowledging the receipt of a resume despite the fact that virtually every employer with more than a few hundred employees has easy, free tools built into their applicant tracking systems that allow them to send automated emails to every job seeker at every step of the hiring process. Any recruiter who works for a mid- to large-sized organization who tells you they don’t have the time to email rejected candidates is either lying or a fool.
So what should job seekers do if they’re well qualified for a position being offered by an organization and can’t get the attention of that organization’s recruiters? One answer is to go around the normal, failed hiring channels by building a web site about why that organization should hire you.
As reported by IndyStar.com, Mark Webster worked as a creative director for Internet startups and was unable to generate any good leads through his traditional job search. Rather than continue to bang his head against a brick wall, he switched strategies and bought the web site domain, ShouldHireMe.com, and then built a customized subdomain such as XYZCorp.ShouldHireMe.com — to make it easy for the organizations he was targeting to find him.
But he didn’t stop at building a series of sites. Instead, he also placed ads on Facebook. He set up the ads to display only the screens of people who worked for the companies he was trying to interview with. He targeted 18 companies that way and got phone calls from ten. “Out of all the normal resumes and cover letters I sent out, I didn’t get one response,” Webster said.
Webster’s strategy was brilliant. Instead of continuing to send his resume into the black hole of applicant tracking systems, he made his availability and interest known in a creative way to ordinary people who already worked for the organizations he was targeting.
So how’s the job search going? “I stopped my job search a couple months ago, and I’m now doing freelancing and consulting work,” he said.
