Quintessential Careers Press:
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media
Introduction: The New Job Search Is All About Relationships
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More than a decade ago, the Internet revolutionized job-seeking. Before the Internet, the job search was a cumbersome process, the centerpiece of which was the Help Wanted portion of newspaper classified-ad sections. Today, as those newsprint sections get thinner and thinner, the vast majority of job-seekers search for jobs online, using the estimated 50,000 job boards on the Web. It now is significantly simpler for job-seekers to apply for jobs electronically compared to the days when they had to send resumes through postal mail in response to newspaper ads. Technology has also made it much easier for employers to recruit, screen, and hire candidates. Applicant tracking software places job-seeker applications and resumes into keyword-searchable databases so employers can narrow down the field by performing a simple electronic search instead of wading through stacks of paper resumes.
Still, the process of hiring and job-hunting through job boards remains flawed for job-seekers, who still feel treated inhospitably when they apply for jobs online, as well as for employers, who lament that few applicants who offer themselves online are qualified. While the downside of applicant tracking systems includes the lack of the human touch in recruiting, these automated systems are a necessary evil for employers. In an era when employers are inundated with resumes -- sometimes thousands for a single opening and tens of thousands a month -- these impersonal applicant-tracking systems are a cost-effective necessity.
Finally seeming to acknowledge that the system is broken, both employers and job-seekers have begun to seek new ways to circumvent the normal channels. In fact, most experts predict that within a decade, resume databases and job boards will be long gone.
Many of the new and emerging ways are part of so-called Web 2.0, defined in part by Web guru Tim O'Reilly as comprising an "architecture of participation." These new ways of recruiting and job-hunting using the social Web as the centerpiece can be characterized as the second big revolution in the online job search. This latest revolution is manifesting itself through the use of a variety of online tools -- blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, portfolios, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more. Individuals, especially younger people, are socially constructing their identities in ways unimagined a dozen or so years ago.
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