Right, so you’ve gone through the motions with your job hunting efforts – you’ve posted your CV on all the major job boards, you’ve been down the job centre, you’ve checked the local newspapers and sent your CV out to a few recruitment agencies…so what now?
Finding the right job is an arduous process – most people end up with more rejection letters than seems natural (if they’re lucky and the recruiter actually takes the time to tell them they didn’t get the job)! You need to take your job hunting efforts to the next level and source as many channels of promotion as possible.
Naturally, most people are limited in the jobs that they can apply for – either limited due to education and experience (and ambition) or limited to a specific geographic area where they can work (or want to work). While the former is a complicated issue to address (and best served in another article), the latter is a much simpler barrier to overcome. Finding jobs in the (regional) area you want to work in isn’t as hard as it may seem at first.
Major job boards – the way to go?
Look at the nature of large UK job sites such as www.s1jobs.co.uk and www.jobsite.co.uk – yes, they have thousands of jobs listed, but they are national businesses – this is the key point. The reach (and indeed, the pricing structure) of these job boards mean that their primary target areas are major cities where larger employers more inclined to spend a large recruitment advertising budget are based.
All very well if you are job hunting in a major city or are considering moving, but if you are like most of the population you may find yourself outside major metropolitan areas and as such the amount of local jobs posted on these sites may be minimal.
This doesn’t mean that the Internet can’t be a good tool to use when job hunting – it just means that you need to approach the task differently.
Aim local to work local
This is the key. If you are trying to promote a local sandwich shop, you don’t take out advertising in national newspapers – you advertise locally. In the same respect, if you are looking for a plumber or electrician you don’t check The Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk) – you check the local newspaper. See where this is going?
You need to adjust your job search strategy to be more in line with your end objective – if you are looking for a job in a small town or local area, then that’s where you need to refine your search to.
Enough chatter now – let’s look at a practical example:
Let’s say you are looking for a job in Solihull. You’ve done a brief search through major job boards and found a few vacancies posted by large employers who can afford major job board fees. Do we stop there? No. There is a whole untapped market of small to medium businesses and organisations who don’t advertise vacancies nationally, so why not target them too?
A quick Google search for “Solihull” brings us to the local government page for Solihull (http://www.solihull.gov.uk). And guess what? All local government websites display civil service job listings for the local area! Have a look at http://www.solihull.gov.uk/jobs/jobsearch.asp for example (note that all local government sites tend to be different).
Perhaps the local council doesn’t have any jobs that suit you – how about other local businesses? There are loads of ways of finding smaller recruitment agencies and small businesses that may be recruitment.
For example you could look at a business directory such as The Best Of (http://www.thebestof.co.uk) where you can find out a bit more about the business as well as taking note of contact details for them. In our example, we could look at The Best Of’s Solihull page (http://www.thebestof.co.uk/Solihull), and browse businesses we’re interested in and find other recruitment agencies.
One last word on your local job search
A key note to remember is that not all businesses have an up to date web presence and a lot who do may only have a few old pages that are frankly, not very pleasant to look at! But don’t be put off by the lack of gloss and shine – a website doesn’t reflect the quality of service you will receive – it’s just a design!
Generally you will find that recruitment agencies in particular have a good level of candidate service (after all, it’s in their interest to have a wide range of candidates on their books) – but smaller local agencies more often than not will go that extra mile for you.
Best of luck with your job search!
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