DISTANCE LEARNING | CONTINUING EDUCATION | ONLINE DEGREES

Remember on Lost (the TV show, I mean) when they were in the Hatch and they had to keep entering the same numbers into that computer every 120 minutes, but they really didn’t know why they were doing it or how it all worked. Well, that’s how I feel about job search sites like Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs.

After faithfully searching for jobs and submitting resumes for the last four years without a single substantial result to speak of, I feel more than a little cheated. I feel a lot cheated, darn it! Duped. Bamboozled. Misled. I mean, the way the whole thing is set up is just cruel. It’s easy to find interesting jobs, they take you directly to a customized page and you can just apply right there. You download your resume, answer a few questions, click the ‘Send’ button, and then… well, and then, who knows what happens. For all we know it gets printed up in Yeti’s lair in the far reaches of Tibet to be used as T.P. for the hairy guy. Or perhaps it gets put into a time capsule and launched into space to the Alpha Centauri system to show our galactic neighbors how naïve and foolish humans are. For all we know, it goes to this big digital drainpipe on the outskirts of the internet where it falls into the black void and disappears completely.

In all seriousness, as easy as they make it to apply, they really only increase the degrees of separation between you and hiring managers. You can’t call them, write them, or even email them. Assuming the resumes actually get to them, they only grab the top few, leaving you with no chance to plead your case or show them your shining personality. You have no way to control the process or sway it in your favor.

So, as of today, I’m swearing off job search sites. I refuse to be led captive by their friendly design, their deceptive offers to help. I’m saying, “Take a hike, Monster. And take your weird creature thing with you. No thanks, Careerbuilder. You’re not building here. Get lost, Hotjobs. This relationship has gone cold.” I’m blazing my own path of face-to-face communication, networking, and sending things via the postal service. If you’re sick and tired of useless job search sites, join with me in ranting. Tell us about your failed relationship with those deadbeat job sites…

No one is announcing it formally, but a recession is on its way, if it is not here already. Recession means the job market is going to get a lot tighter. What does this mean for working professionals and upcoming college grads alike? Does this mean the job market and the workplace will become a virtual American Gladiators arena where the weak and uncommitted are run asunder by the powerful and ambitious? Not quite. But it is time to bring your A-game and be prepared for the worst.

Your game plan should be two-pronged: make yourself as invincible as possible and create a safety net. The coming job market will be handling an overwhelming surplus of applicants. With company belts tightening, employers will be looking for the absolute most bang for their buck. Taken together, this means employers will pick and choose between candidates with the highest level of scrutiny. Only those who can offer real value to the company will survive the sifting process. Those with weak credentials or performance may soon find themselves in the unemployment line. Also, of course, nothing is guaranteed in markets like these, even for the most deserving. Take steps to prepare for the possibility of unemployment.

The following four tips will help you survive the coming recession with your shirt on. Put your best foot forward and watch your back, and you will live to fight another day. You might even find yourself riding higher than ever:

1. Make yourself indispensable.

Think about it: Who gets laid off in a recession? The love handles of the organization, the excess weight, the folks that are not essential to the company’s future. Your focus, therefore, should be on getting your name into that pool of people who are indispensable to the organization, those who are the heart, brain, or lungs of the company.

How do you accomplish this? If you are an upcoming college grad, you should be focusing on obtaining skills and experience that will say to recruiters that you will be a strong contributor to their company. First you want to be clearly superior to your job-hunting peers. You might work on gaining relevant certificates or taking on internships. You should be going above and beyond the crowd in participating in relevant extracurricular activities, like business competitions or field studies. Second, you want that superiority to translate clearly to value added for the company. Show in your resume and interviews how these skills and experience will equal success for their company. The candidate who can bring the most to the table and plainly show how they will benefit the company will win the job.

If you are a working professional, you also can obtain relevant degrees or certificates on the side. Most of your advantage will be found, however, in embedding yourself into the most vital functions of the business. Take on the most important projects and knock the ball out of the ballpark. Volunteer to be a part of new, important initiatives. Make yourself absolutely crucial to their plans. When they are considering who to let go, they will tremble at the thought of losing you. Maybe Joe in the next cubicle over, but certainly not you.

2. Mine your network.

Most people wait until they’ve been handed their walking papers to start calling friends and family looking for jobs. Obviously, that is too late. Networking now is one of the best things you can do to ensure that you have a job later for a couple reasons. During a recession, employers are inundated with job applications and resumes. Going through friends and family allows you to cut through all of that clutter and get straight to the decision-makers. It also gives you that extra boost over most of your competitors.

If you are getting ready to graduate, get on the phone with Uncle Charlie and Grandma Joyce and you will find yourself leaps and bounds beyond most of your peers, most of whom are likely pouring resumes into Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com which will be destined for that black hole where internet resumes go. If you are catching negative vibes at work, start mining your friends now. Having another job to fall back on is always a good thing. And who knows? You may actually network yourself into an even better job.

3. Cut down your debt.

The people who fare the worst during recessions are those who have procrastinated resolving their financial problems. In the event that you lost your income, nothing would put the nail in the coffin faster than exorbitant credit card payments. No, the Piper does not take a break during a recession; he mails you, calls you, takes your boat, car, big screen TV, house, and the shirt off your back if he has to. He will get paid. That’s why it’s best to minimize, or eliminate altogether, your relationship with the Piper before you find yourself empty-handed.

Begin now to say no to additional credit card spending and yes to putting as much money as you can into reducing your consumer debt. Learn to live lean. Once you’ve lost your job, it’s too late to decide to get those bills under control. Do yourself a huge favor and start now. Maybe you’ll keep your job. Maybe you’ll end up make more than you did before. But you will never regret take this step toward financial freedom.

4. Put some money away.

Experts recommend having three- to six-months worth of income set aside for a rainy day. I know, in this day and age of wild consumer spending, this advice sounds like it came straight from your great-aunt Dolores. I mean, how can you possibly set aside that much money? Most of us are lucky if we have anything in our savings accounts. But let’s be realistic here: an average severance package is around two-weeks pay. It takes more than two weeks to find, start, and get paid for a new job. The bills won’t stop coming in. What choice do we have but to put some amount of money away, at least enough to pay the bills for a few weeks?

Saving money sounds old-fashionable now. But it won’t when you don’t have to worry about Bruno the Repo Man showing up in the middle of the night to take your BMW. In fact, Great-Aunt Dolores is sounding better and better.

You’re probably realizing by now that the key to surviving a recession is to get ahead of the curve. Six months from now, authorities will announce that the recession is official. Everyone else will be going bonkers. But not you, my friend. If you’ve heeded my advice, you will be resting easy.

About the author

Marcus Varner earned his BA in English from Brigham Young University with a Creative Writing emphasis. He is currently in his second year at BYU’s lauded MBA program studying Marketing. He blogs, writes fiction and screenplays, loves movies, and can’t resist playing superheroes with his kids.

If you are graduating from college soon, today is a great day. No, not just because you finally managed to match your socks, you perfected the fine art of cooking oatmeal, or your midterm has been postponed a week (which are all fine reasons to celebrate, by the way). Today is a great day because job growth is up.

That’s right. The Labor Department reported today that the U.S. job market increased by 166,000 jobs in October- that’s nearly twice the growth projected by economists. Babyboomers are retiring from the workforce at ever increasing rates, and new jobs are being created. And the situation will only get better: statisticians predict a huge job surplus in the U.S. in the next ten years- that is, more jobs than people to fill them. What does this mean for upcoming college grads? They will have more job opportunities than almost any other class before them.

So, all those horror stories about working for four years to get a Marketing degree only to end up stocking shelves at the local Dollar General will hopefully be a thing of the past. In the past, college grads have had to enter a marketplace packed with competitors for a single job. They’ve had to lie, cheat, and steal to get their foot in the door. Now, however, recruiters will be lying, cheating, and stealing to get your attention.

What’s the worst thing you could do right now? Reject all uses of modern technology, take up residence in a cave for the winter, adopt a monastic lifestyle in the mountains of Timbuktu, or otherwise take yourself off the radar.

What’s the best thing you could do right now? Put yourself out there for the recruiters to see. I can’t resist giving lists of five, and so here I provide a list of five suggestions to help you get noticed and take advantage of this unprecedented season of job plentitude:

1. Polish your resume.

It’s been accumulating various jobs and internships, skills and extracurricular experiences, while you’ve been in school. But like so many things, a resume can always be improved and refined. Formatting can be tweaked to enhance your best points and minimize glaring white space. Phrasing can be honed to pull recruiters’ eyeballs straight to your strengths.

Find a resume expert or career counselor (every university has one), and have them recommend some improvements to your resume. They will be nitpicky. But, more importantly, they will look at your resume with recruiter’s eyes. They will be able sight things that seem trivial to you but will make a big difference in getting your resume noticed.

2. Post your resume.

So you’ve put together a high-performance resume, ready to tear through the clutter and have companies kicking down your door. Now they’ve got to see it. What’s the easiest way to get it in front of thousands of recruiters? Post it.

Of course, online job sites like Monster and CareerBuilder allow you to post your resume where employers can see them. However, with the ability to show your resume to thousands of recruiters also comes thousands of applicants, all of them flooding one recruiter with mountains of resumes. Your resume may be good. But your odds of being seen, just statistically speaking, are bad.

Therefore, posting on more restricted sites, like your college career website, greatly improves your chances of getting noticed. Outside of school sites, you can often find club or association websites that provide the same exclusivity. These sites provide many benefits to job seekers- this is one of them.

3. Attend information sessions.

Companies come to colleges all the time to educate students on the opportunities that they offer. They also let recruiters survey the hiring pool. They bring you into a conference room, usually with food and drinks, sit you down with handfuls of glossy company pamphlets, and then go through a Powerpoint presentation on why their company is the best ever and what kinds of jobs they offer. They then usually open the floor for Q&A, which is an awesome opportunity for students to open a dialogue with recruiters.

After Q&A, recruiters will hang around and talk. If students are interested, they can hang out and talk with recruiters one-on-one, gaining valuable contacts and making a first impression.

Compare this personal interaction with just throwing your resume into some black hole on a company’s website. Recruiters will see your face and personality and will have a much greater chance of remembering you when your resume arrives. On the other hand, the resume submitted solely online, without any other personal communication, may be discovered by some future civilization to benefit their understanding of primitive human culture. I’d rather take the first.

4. Tap into your network.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Your greatest resource in your job search is your family, friends, and acquaintances. Maybe you don’t know anyone in the field that you want to get into. But there is a good chance that someone you know does know someone in your desired field. And if, by some remote turn of fate, they don’t, the odds are even higher that they know someone who knows someone in your desired field.

What is the difference between just handing out your resume to strangers and working through your friends and family? Simple. Your friends and family know you. They’re already on your side, in your cheering section. Unless you’ve ticked them off, they want to help you out and see you succeed.

Do you have to "hit them up" for jobs? Nope. It’s as easy as mentioning to them that you are looking for work after college, telling them a little about your goals and dreams, and then letting them get involved.

5. Buy a suit.

Get ready to sit in front of lots of interviewers and look snazzy. Your dress doesn’t have to say you are a billionaire playboy. But it should convey to the recruiter that you will easily transition into their organization.

So ditch the ancient corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows. Humor only counts for so much. Showing that you have a clue is much more worthwhile. Get yourself an affordable, conservative suit. Shave. Get a haircut. Brush your teeth. And get ready to shine.

The future is bright, my friends. Make the right moves and you could easily have your pick of jobs. Are you getting ready to graduate? What are you doing for your job search? If you’re planning on stocking shelves at Dollar General, I apologize…

About the author

Marcus Varner earned his BA in English from Brigham Young University with a Creative Writing emphasis. He is currently in his second year at BYU’s lauded MBA program studying Marketing. He blogs, writes fiction and screenplays, loves movies, and can’t resist playing superheroes with his kids.