You need marketing to sell anything. Whether it is nuts and bolts or needles and pins, no one is going to buy it if they don’t know about it. The same is also true when it comes to you and the marketing of your services to a prospective employer. Your personal marketing piece happens to be your resume.
If it gets to the right people, you might land that dream job you’ve always wanted. Using the post office is the slow and expensive way to get the word out about you. Thanks to the Internet, you can attach your resume to an email and zoom that puppy off to an employer. Is this easy? Yes. Are you going to encounter any problems sending a resume this way? Again, the answer is yes. Sending your resume out in cyberspace blasts does little good. Nobody likes spam. If the employer isn’t looking for a person with your skills, then your resume may go directly to the Recycle Bin. Sending your resume out via the Internet need not look like a sci-fi laser battle. Fortunately, there are alternatives to the “wham, spam, who gives a damn?” strategy of mass resume marketing. You can take advantage of the services offered by several websites, which put a little sanity into this outer space job hunting.
ResumeZapper.com probably will not win any awards for way cool computer graphics. So, what’s the attraction for this site? This is a portal to more than 6500 placement professionals, who receive resumes directly from this site. If you aren’t ready for dozens of placement folk cluttering up your email box with messages, please don’t panic. ResumeZapper.com has a Confidential Email Box service. Messages will be sent to it, and then forwarded on to you. The only way a headhunter could contact you directly would be if your email address were on your resume. Needless to say, you may wish to delete the email address from your resume in this instance.
An excellent resume distribution site is ResumeXPRESS.com. A service of Gongyea Career Marketing, Inc., ResumeXPRESS will distribute your resume to thousands of hiring sites such as employers, professional recruiters, and resume databases. OK, that sounds sweet, but what makes ResumeXPRESS stand out? ResumeXPRESS has established relationships with the hiring partners in which a keyword screening process is established. The hiring partner receives those resumes that have been screened in. What this means is that only those hiring partners who are actively looking for someone with your credentials will receive your resume (Assuming, of course, that your credentials match the keyword screening). The process is called By Invitation, and it assures that your resume reaches those who may truly be interested in what you have to offer.
Your Missing Link.com doesn’t ask the employers what they want; they ask what you want. You specify the type of job you are looking for, by industry, position, and salary range, You also get to choose the database of professional recruiters or employers where you would like your paperwork to be sent. You can choose from Retained Recruiter, Contingency Recruiter, High Growth Companies, or Venture Capital firm databases. Wherever you want your resume to go, Your Missing Link will send it. Please remember to be reasonable and realistic when you make your selections.
Let’s face it; there are probably not too many openings for customer service reps in Honolulu that pay $100,000 a year.
This all sounds great, doesn’t it? You and your email server are saved a lot of time and trouble, right? So, is there any catch? Well, the best things in live are free but resume distribution service isn’t one of them. As of this writing, ResumeZapper.com charges $49.99 for its basic service. Additional services, such as a Confidential Email Box, costs extra. The price for ResumeXPRESS ranges from $39.95 to $199.95, depending on the service package. Prices charged by Your Missing Link are tailored to the specifications of your resume distribution campaign and can range from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars. Before you get scared away by the costs, consider this. Your time is important when you are hunting for a job. A self-managed job search can take hours. A resume distribution service frees up a large block of your time that can be used for other activities, such as networking. Moreover, the results of a distribution service’s efforts can be extremely rewarding. Your Missing Link estimates a 25-30% response shortly after the email resumes are sent out. A sample search I conducted while using Your Missing Link netted over 1,000 contacts. This means I could expect anywhere from 250 – 300 or more responses from the resume distribution. It would take weeks to generate that kind of response if I did it all by myself! You should also consider any additional service that is offered to you by a resume distribution service. ResumeXPRESS in particular will go the distance. Its site offers a free critique of your existing resume, helping you make the editorial changes you may need to catch the eye of a prospective employer. If you are an executive who has been forced to go job hunting due to corporate changes, there is an executive transition page to help you start the process of finding a new position. ResumeXPRESS also allows you to subscribe to an email newsletter, CareerKnoweldge.net, which you would receive twice a month at no charge.
Job hunting can be time consuming or time efficient depending on the decisions that you make. Certainly, you can rough it out and do all the work yourself, but why? A resume distribution service is far more efficient than a one man show, and can deliver the desired results in a far shorter period of time. The value of resume distribution services is becoming more obvious as the economy slows down, and the number of layoffs increases. Anyone who has been pink slipped can tell you that a lay off gets more expensive the longer the period of idleness. A resume distribution service can help end a layoff period before the financial costs overwhelm you. Granted, the services do cost money, but not a whole lot. When you consider the amount of time saved by using such a service, the return on your investment more than compensates for any expense you might incur.
Keith Harlow is a contributing writer at MedioCom.net. This well designed and easy to navigate site has quality and affordable feature stories, articles and images. You can choose from a wide variety of timely and relevant topics, all easily accessed through http://www.mediocom.net. Check it out today!
