Job Hunting Strategies For Applicants Who Are Over 45

Once you have reached age 45, it becomes more difficult to find a job. Although you should not be discriminated against because of your age, you still cannot force employers to hire you if there are younger people who are all too willing to accept employment at a much lower rate than yours. Even if you are over 45 years old, however, you should not despair. There are a lot of ways in which you can increase your chances of getting considered for a position.

Revamp Your Resume

Even if you are not looking for a new job, it is important to update your resume regularly so that when the right opportunity comes, you will not find it difficult to come up with a fresh application letter and Curriculum Vitae. If this is your first time to apply for work in a decade or two, it is important that you delete any work experience that is not included in the last 10 to 15 years. Your pizza delivery gig after high school may no longer be relevant to the position you are applying for now. Unless you are applying for a chief executive or vice president position, it is a good idea not to show off your vast experience in the field. The recruiter might think you are over qualified for the position.

Consider a Career Change

One thing that you need to understand is that nothing is permanent. Your job may already be extinct in the next 10 years. If you think that your work experience is no longer relevant or sought after in the employment market, then it may be a good idea to consider changing your career. You might need to try new things and learn new skills. If you do not know how to use the computer or surf the Internet, now is the right time to try attending courses and seminars that will make you computer literate and Internet savvy. You have to be abreast with the times to make you more competitive and attractive to recruiters in the employment market.

Try to Update Yourself

If you think that your skills and knowledge are still relevant at present, then what you need to do is to simply update yourself. It is important that you read newspapers, magazines, and articles on the Internet about the new trends in your field. Even if you have extensive experience but you are not open to change, recruiters may not be all too willing to consider you for a job. Also, try attending training programs that will focus on self development to help you land a good position.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online http://www.sixsigmaonline.org offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

Job Hunting Strategies

Tips for your Job Search

In the old days, finding a job was easy. All you had to do was get your hands on a flint-tipped spear and skewer a few mastodons and you were considered gainfully employed. The only headhunters were people who were after your skull, and "getting your name out there" meant painting it on a cave wall. As much as we may long for these simple times, the job search of today is a much more complicated and often vicious process. After all, they don't call it job "hunting" for nothing. Today's competitive and fast-paced job market has forced job seekers to develop a variety of techniques in order to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve. The only way to go about your job search is to think as though you're employed in the business of finding yourself a job.

For most people, having a job means that they go to work at a certain time, do their best to finish a certain number of tasks, and leave at a certain time. While the actual amount of time and energy spent varies from employee to employee, the formula remains the same. But when most people look for a job their search often turns into a free-for-all. Many job seekers don't realize that organization and time management pose just as much of a problem for them as it does for the employed. This is especially true for people coming out of college, who may or may not have held a long-term full-time job.

If you think about it in terms of our ancestors, you're not going to bring home any fish if you're not standing in the stream with your spear in hand everyday. In an effort to bring you back to your prehistoric roots. Don't Procrastinate Looking for a job can seem like an impossible task, leading to frustration and disgust. If you find yourself reading every magazine in the house, rearranging the furniture, and sewing new curtains because you're too overwhelmed by your job search, it's time to get a grip and reprioritize. The best way to avoid procrastinating is to set manageable goals for yourself. Don't hesitate to put a padlock on your Nintendo and rid yourself of any distractions that will keep you from focusing on the task at hand: job hunting.

Set Goals for Yourself and Prioritize Them

At the beginning of each day or week, set your goals. Your goals should not be overwhelming ones like "Have a well paying job by the end of the month," but rather a series of smaller goals that will lead to employment. That way, each time you check something off your list it will be a victory.

Possible goals might include finding out the best person to contact about an interview or returning a prospective employer's phone call by the end of the workday. By giving each of these tasks a priority level--low to high--you begin, you can make sure you use your time wisely. The priority level of these goals will change daily, and the smart job seeker learns to roll with the punches in order to complete high-priority tasks.

Plan to Work Regular Hours at Your Job Search

Regular and steady hours when you hunt for work. This doesn't mean that you have to sit hunched over your computer for a full eight hours, but you should be doing things that will move your job hunt forward. Sample tasks might include phone calls to get the proper spelling of the names of hiring managers; drafting a cover letter; researching a company; networking with a neighbor over coffee; and training yourself on a computer program that will make you more hirable. When you do these things doesn't really matter, but make sure at least some of your working hours fall during the business hours of the companies you're contacting.

Make Sure You Have What You Need

If you were out hunting for food, you'd need certain equipment to be successful. You'd have your spear (more effective than bare hands), comfortable moccasins (to protect your feet from thorns), and furry loincloth (because it looks good). Searching for a job is no different.

Set your desk up with office supplies, folders for tracking information, and anything else you might need to work comfortably. If you don't have these things on hand when you begin, you'll spend a lot of time running to the copy shop and office supply store when you should be looking for a job.

Don't Work Yourself into the Ground

Unless your job is working on sleep-deprivation studies, you want to be fresh when you're interviewing and when you start work. If you toil 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at your job search, you're going to burn out. The last thing you want to do is to work so hard trying to get interviews that when you finally enter one, you're only able to communicate through grunts and whistles. Get plenty of rest, drink plenty of fluids, and stay healthy so you don't start your brand-new job on sick leave. This includes making sure you don't get stressed out. Looking for work can be tough, but if you do what you need to do to keep your spirits up, you should be fine.

Get Your Friends and Family to Help

The people you're close to can do more in your job search than bring you pizza and listen to you complain about looking for a job. Depending on their temperaments, your friends and family can help you research companies, conduct mock interviews, and proofread your résumé and cover letters. They are also a great source for networking. And chances are they'll be more than willing to help as long as you're appreciative. Just as a prehistoric hunter would bring meat back to the cave for the whole tribe, promise to take them out on the town as soon as you get your new high-profile, high-paying job.

As you go through this rite of initiation, keep looking forward to the feast. It will get you through the lean times, just as it did for the cave people

Manik Thapar (MBA) [http://www.careerpath.cc]

Online recruitment-job search strategies of the modern State.

History of Job Search

Online recruitment started almost the same time in the USA and in England in the early 90's with providers like Monster.com in the USA, Jobserve.com in the UK and Allstarjobs.ca (started in 1997). A job bank at that time merely had a few thousand of open job positions and the chance of putting employers in touch with jobseekers was quite remote.

Since those early days, we have seen an explosion of job search sites and the technology has improved a lot for the benefit of both, recruiters and jobseekers. Nowadays, typing "Job Search" in search fields of Google or Yahoo, you get millions of pages dealing with this subject.

Now we have a new problem: how not to get lost in this jungle of ultimate Career and Job Search Services (of which many require an inscription fee). What do we really want? Using the Internet in first place has the advantage of speed and the possibility to look in any geographical area for the required job that the candidate is qualified for, or aspires to. With the Internet installed at home, it is possible to investigate the potential employers, ask questions and apply for the position, without even taking off your pajamas.

How do we explain the recent evolution in online recruitment technology? Even if you feel relatively satisfied with the current search offerings of top job search engines like Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com or Hotjobs.com, there are still many doors open for improvements and a lot of research is going on in the field of vertical engines, meaning-based search, intent-driven search, new clustering methods, and much more.

All-in-One Job Search Engines

A recent trend in job search engines is the emergence of all-in-one or metasearch engines (sometimes also referred as vertical job search engines), allowing jobseekers to search across multiple websites. Among the most popular engines are Indeed (in the USA), Wowjobs (in Canada) and Trovit (in the UK).

Probably the most powerful of all is Indeed, which was founded by Paul Forster and his partner Rony Kahan in the year 2004 to cover the US job market. According to Hitwise data, Indeed saw its market share increase by 302% in the year 2006 and this was only the beginning. The success of Indeed and other metasearch or all-in-one search engines is the fact that job seekers can go to one place to find all jobs, overcoming the limitation of the job boards, which have a finite number of listings. A simple comparison of mayor job search engines reveals that there is no need any more to look in all the individual engines to find the best fits for the job you are looking for. There are more job sites than you can count, ranging from the top job sites like Monster and CareerBuilder to small, niche sites in just about every career field you can imagine. Meta job search engines like Indeed or Wowjobs are searching in more than 1200 engines at a time and brings you the result in seconds on your screen. With a couple of clicks of your mouse, you search the major job sites, company sites, associations, and other online job sites by keyword and location to get job listings that match the criteria you selected. With it's high-tech search strategy, Indeed clearly leaves behind other so-called meta-job search engines like Jobster and SimpyHired. With Wowjobs and Trovit, metasearch engines focused on the Canadian and UK job market respectively, the situation is very similar.

Posting your resume in Recruitment Services

A developing trend with both jobs search engines and jobs boards is that many now encourage users to post their resume or CV together with contact details. The fact is, it`s proven that posting your resume in a proactive way in the mayor resume distribution systems will put it on the desk of hundreds of recruiters and can more than double the chance of getting a job!

The advantages of Resume Posting are:

- You more than double your chance of getting "discovered" by a recruiter who is looking for a person with exactly your experience and abilities.

- You put your resume in the hands of hundreds of recruiters, almost instantly!

- You are sending your resume only to recruiters focusing on your specific industry or job categories.

- You save a lot of time and money and you get an instant edge - with only little effort from your part!

- Your resume is passing a pre-selection system and when it comes on the desk of hiring managers they will read it very carefully.

Resume posting has become an attractive business for the recruitment companies as they sell the access to their resume bank to headhunters and recruiting managers. Anyhow, jobseekers should be aware of the risks of uploading personal information to the Internet since they have no control over what will happen with their data and their resume might be seen by their current employer or even by "identity thefts".

Take a breath and slow down
The question is still if all the improvements in search technology also improved the overall performance of recruitment efforts. Finding a job still is hard work. It is very helpful to slow down, take time, and analyze if you are happy with your current situation and what career is really right for you. In our modern world, the best job success is earning good money with work that gives you a sense of purpose, expresses your talents and passions, and is consistent with your values. A lack of many Job Search Sites is that they do not assist the jobseekers in finding their best career fit and even confusing people in trying to evaluate their current situation. Job searching is a short-term pursuit of a position that matches your financial and career goals. Career planning is a long, progressive process of choosing education, training, and jobs that fit your interests and skills. This planning process also includes the evaluation of career change or self-employment opportunities. Deciding what type of work you want to pursue requires knowledge and understanding of your interests, your values, your motivation, and the skills you enjoy using the most. This is helpful whether you are choosing a career for the first time or changing careers for the twenty-first time.

One aspect that even the most powerful Job Search engine cannot cover is the fact that probably the majority of job vacancies are never posted in journals, newspapers or on-line and you only find them using the right contacts or your Network.

This "hidden job market" only can be exploited by keeping focus on people who have experiences, and contacts that might be interesting for you.

Good possibilities to build up your Network, are for example job fairs or similar events where you meet hiring managers, job lead sources and other valuable contacts.

Conclusions
Using state-of-the art job search engines, online recruitment has become a powerful tool for a fast, efficient and economical job search and the performance is improving constantly. But every jobseeker should be aware of the fact that even the most powerful job search engine should be considered only as a single tool in the Job Search Strategy and that still most jobs are found using personal Networks. Finding a job is all about people, the people you know, and people you meet who have the job information and who will inevitably help you get a job. Online Job Search using all-in-one or metasearch engines definitely makes life much easier but should not be overestimated.

Resources

1) Two-Approach Job Search Guide - 2ajobguide.com
2) David Hurst,Chairman - ORMC, 2004
3) Joel Cheesman's Blog, "Craigslist puts smackdown on verticals", October 19, 2006.
4) INTERNET Inc, "Job Search Verticals - The List", October 5, 2006.
5) Read/WriteWeb, "Search 2.0 - What's Next?", December 13, 2006.

About the Author

Oswald J. Eppers, PhD is manager of the consulting firm E&R InterConsult and founder of the Two-Approach Guide for easy and effective Job Searching and Career Assessment. He has more than 10 years experience as freelance consultant in the field of outsourcing, environmental and quality management.