How to Get Noticed on Online Job Boards

The early bird gets the worm!

Online job boards such as Monster, Yahoo! HotJobs, and CareerBuilder, make it easy for you to identify plenty of interesting job openings. But many qualified job seekers find themselves submitting resume after resume without any response from hiring managers.

To understand why, think about the dynamics of an online job posting from the hiring manager's point of view. Within moments after posting a position online, the hiring manager is inundated with dozens, if not hundreds, of resumes and cover letters—-many of them from amply qualified candidates.

The hiring manager doesn't have the time or energy to analyze all of these resumes. Instead, out of necessity, he or she identifies a handful of the most promising interview candidates out of the first resumes received. In the vast majority of cases, the job is offered to one of those interviewees.

If you apply for a posting that is weeks old, chances are that the hiring manager has already hit their saturation level and no longer has the time or energy to give you a fighting chance.

Boost your application-to-interview ratio by making sure your resume and cover letter are among the first a hiring manager receives. After identifying the search terms that yield your target jobs, make a habit of running a search and sending off a resume and customized cover letter each morning.

Joe D., a RedRocketResume client and Facilities Manager in Boise, Idaho, says, "Over the course of several years, I applied to (what seemed like) endless jobs on several of the big job websites without getting an interview. After learning of how important a quick response is, I started sending in my resume to new postings on a daily basis so my resume was always at the top of the hiring manager's stack. Within just a few weeks, I had 5 interviews and 3 solid leads."

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