This morning my attention was drawn to a blog post entitled The Dangers of Mass E-mailing Job Applications.

Imagine my relief when I found that it’s a blog post with some excellent advice that has nothing to do with what JobCannon does.

The post is really about how you should customize your cover letters and applications when applying for positions.

I would like to draw your attention both to the post and to the comment that I made to the post regarding how what JobCannon does is different from what she’s talking about.

On the Magnificent Soar Blog, I just read how Anita Salinas found a new job by using her network.

She did not use JobCannon, but much of the process she used to find a job is exactly what we encourage people to do and her process could have possibly been eased by using our tools.

Important lessons from her search include (but are not limited to):

Reactivated my network by sending personalized, not blanket, emails to folks in my network asking for help, references, and introductions.  Luckily, I already had a good 300+ documented in linkedin.

Networked my way to interviews by first finding a posting, then identifying someone in my network who worked at that company, contacting then for intelligence, and asking them to call/send an email of recommendation and my resume directly to the hiring manager.  This was the singlemost effective action to acquiring the position.

Aggregators simplyhired and indeed became my job boards of choice, as they provided more useful results/better matches.  I started out paying for TheLadders but did not feel it yielded as good results.  Eventually, I set up alerts for my areas of interest/skills ie. “BPM Marketing in Atlanta”, for automatic delivery via RSS or email.  While I did not get my job via these mechanisms, they were still useful, as over time, as I got a sense of what types of jobs were out there, what was popular, who was hiring, how quickly posts would come and go, what key words to put on my resume, and how to better position myself.

There is more information in her post and I encourage you to read it, as her formula for finding a job was not only effective, but what we at JobCannon believe you should be doing to be most effective with any job search.