What Every Executive Job Seeker Needs to Know About Using Job Boards

Your executive job search isn’t going well, but you don’t know why.

You’ve been spending hours and hours every day scouring the job boards, customizing your resume and responding to postings.

Why is nothing (or very little) happening?

Maybe this is what you’re thinking . . .

“My resume and LinkedIn profile are ready. Next step: I have to hit the job boards hard.”

Many job seekers believe that being up-to-date with the latest internet-driven job search methods means continuously blasting their resume out to any job posting that remotely looks like a potential fit.

Job boards typically yield a dismal estimated 5-10% success rate, especially for c-suite and senior-level executives.

ATS: One of the biggest problems with job boards

And then there’s the problem of getting your resume through the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) used by executive recruiters and HR professionals.

These systems are not standardized. There are something like 200 different ATS software applications.

Many perfect fit candidates are overlooked because their resumes fail to make it through an ATS:

Their resumes may lack the right keywords which ATS databases parse to call up viable candidates.
Their resumes may not be formatted in a way that makes the content accessible to the various ATS being used by recruiters and HR.

Most c-suite and senior-level executive jobs never land on job boards

It doesn’t make sense to spend any more than a very small amount of your probably limited job search time on a method that has such a poor ROI.

But be aware that it does make sense to use job boards for company/industry research and market intelligence.

Your time is much better spent networking, both the old way (real-life networking) and the new way (social networking), to open yourself to
the goldmine of so-called “hidden jobs”.

According to Career Sherpa Hannah Morgan:

“The best way to tap into the hidden job market, reduce your perceived risk as a candidate and increase the chance of getting an interview is by having conversations with people (aka networking).”