THE ULTIMATE GOAL of a job site (and they are not all created equal!) is to deliver the highest volume of candidate applications to the job poster (the recruiter or employer), while also providing candidates (job-seekers) with access to the highest volume of top-quality job listings.

Since recruitment classifieds moved online more than two decades ago, the ease with which job-seekers could apply for jobs increased.

Job posters went from getting a handful of applications over the course of a few weeks to hundreds all at once. This spawned the need for businesses to best manage and dare I say it, automate and systemise the hiring process.

Applicant tracking systems

So the industry developed ATSs (applicant tracking systems), which let recruiters and HR departments create, post and manage a single job listing across multiple job sites. (With the click of a button, one job ad can be pushed out to as many job sites as the ATS integrates with; yielding many hundreds of responses.)

It’s job then, is to syphon the good applicants — those with CVs containing keywords and other elements of the poster’s predetermined criteria for refining applicants — down to a manageable number.

Proactive recruitment & your resume

Popularised by the world’s largest professional networking site LinkedIn, is the concept of “proactive recruitment,” in which recruiters and HR professionals are always connecting with potential talent so that, if at some point in the near future, a position becomes available they already have a pool of pre-screened candidates to reach out to.

At LinkedIn, they offer a product called “Talent Solutions,” which lets recruiters and employers search the profiles of their 560 million members worldwide based on whatever criteria the recruiter likes.

Seek offers a similar product called “Talent Search,” though, here, recruiters search some 11,000 (Australia-wide) job-seeker CVs. Indeed calls theirs “Indeed Resume.”

Job alerts to keep you up-to-date

If you’re a freelancer or contract bookkeeper, set up a job alert at one or two of the leading job sites for accounting and bookkeeping jobs (Seek, Indeed, Jora) and constantly peruse and apply for positions until you build up your roster of clients.

As a general rule, the first 48 to 72 hours after posting yields the highest volume of applications to a new job listing; responses tend to peter off after about a week. After two to three days, most employers have more than enough applications to start contacting people for interviews; after a week, they usually don’t bother checking responses; unless it’s a hard-to-fill job role — in engineering, say.

Why going for a job these days is like starting your own business!

We’ve been in business for many years now and have developed a keen understanding of what clients (students) want; what they need from us to help them get a job; and what other companies in the job training market are offering.

With this knowledge we can then package our courses with the essential ingredients students need — at the most competitive price.

Indeed, being a job seeker, particularly nowadays with the competitive environment job seekers face, involves the same skills as starting your own business. You have to package your resume, be “salesy” in your cover letter, research your employer before you meet (just as businesses need to stay abreast of their competitors), communicate well, be able to work independently — the list goes on.

Will you be the person they choose for the accounts job?

But you can equip yourself with the skills you need in our competitively priced EzyStartUp Business Course — and it might even help you get work close to home! Many people are using these skills to start working for themselves in a risk-free way while still in their current jobs.

In this competitive environment it helps to know yourself really well as there may well be aspects to your employment history or tasks you’ve done and skills you’ve developed outside of the work environment that you can be drawing on to help you win work.

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Remember, our Career Academy Success Program is available for FREE to all students as a free student inclusion when you enrol in one of our online training courses.