Get Hired Now!

How to Accelerate Your Job Search, Stand Out, and Land Your Next Great Opportunity

Ian Siegel

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119794448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller Accelerate your job search, stand out, and land your next great opportunity

In Get Hired Now!, ZipRecruiter founder and CEO Ian Siegel tells you exactly how to find a new job fast. With an insider's view of how over a million employers really make hires, Ian pulls insights from the data to give you step-by-step instructions for writing a resume that works, finding the right jobs to apply to, acing a job interview, and negotiating a job offer.

• Debunk the conventional wisdom
• Break the unconscious habits that are sabotaging your success
• Get hired in record time

Relevant for every stage of your career and for every industry, Get Hired Now! is a one-stop resource for job seekers looking to level up, stand out, and land the job.

II
Find the Right Job!

5
Use Job Sites That Have These Features

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“I'm 64 years old and I don't think this generation fully appreciates how simple finding a job is today. When I got out of school, I searched through classified ads in the newspaper, printed out my resume, wrote a cover letter, mailed all that in an envelope with a stamp I'd have to lick, and then waited three to four weeks for a letter back or a phone call. It makes me laugh when people complain today about how hard it is to find a job.”

—Employee who knows things could be worse

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Over the past eight years, job search technology has gone through a revolution, but only a handful of sites have the necessary scale, dollars to invest, and engineering talent to build modern solutions. Let's go through the features you should care about.

Feature 1: Has All the Jobs in One Place

The first disruptive change to the job category happened back in 2008 when the aggregators appeared. Unlike traditional job boards that would only display jobs employers paid to post, aggregators scoured the web to find all the jobs from every site, and made them searchable in one place. Aggregators had millions of jobs while old school job boards only had a few hundred thousand. Obviously this greatly expedited job search.

Today there are a handful of sites including ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Monster, and Indeed that use the aggregation approach. Each company uses different technology to find the jobs that are out there, so there is some variation in what jobs you'll find on each site. (For example, Indeed excludes the millions of jobs directly posted on ZipRecruiter from their search engine.)

When it comes to job search, any site that doesn't have all the jobs in one place is forcing you to use multiple sites. Who's got time for that!

Feature 2: Enables You to Apply to Jobs with One Click

One of the most frustrating realities of modern job search is that many employers require job boards to send you offsite to the company's corporate job page in order to submit an application. These corporate job pages are not only difficult to navigate on your mobile device, they also often require you to go through a full site registration before you can apply. These experiences are so onerous that very few of the potential applicants who are sent off to a corporate job site from a job board complete an application! No one wants to spend 15 minutes figuring out how to apply to a single job. Fortunately you don't have to.

The best job sites will have done a technical integration with all of the vendors that power these corporate job sites. That means you'll be able to one-click apply to many jobs without ever leaving your primary job site interface. This is a tremendous time saver and makes rejection, should it happen, sting a little less.

If you don't see a “one-click” or “one-tap” apply option on your current job site, or if you find yourself being sent to other sites to apply over and over again, it's time to switch to one of the big modern job boards.

Feature 3: Picks Jobs Just for You

On average, aggregators like ZipRecruiter have north of 6 million open jobs at any one time, with millions of new jobs cycling through every month.¹ Searching through all those jobs once can be a daunting challenge, let alone trying to monitor for new opportunities on an ongoing basis. The task is beyond most job seekers. Surprisingly, until recently it was also beyond the capability of all job sites.

One of the most shocking things I discovered about the job board industry back in 2010 when we launched ZipRecruiter is that the majority of job sites were terrible at notifying job seekers about new jobs. Many of them didn't even try to do it. No daily email alerts. No suggested jobs. And the idea of highlighting a single job for which the job seeker was especially qualified—a fantasy. It literally didn't exist.

And then in the early 2010s, everything changed overnight. Technological advances made it possible for companies to build smart software. Everyone calls this “artificial intelligence” (AI).

AI has now been deployed to give you better job recommendations. When AI helps you pick jobs for which you are best suited, employer satisfaction with applicants dramatically improves. On ZipRecruiter, employers give applications a thumbs-up if they want to shortlist them, and a thumbs-down if they want to reject them. When we introduced AI, we saw the thumbs-up rate climb from 15% to 35%² over the next three years. These algorithms get smarter the more information you feed them.

Thanks to the emergence of AI, you now live in a golden age where AI can pick “just right” jobs for you as soon as they are posted. ZipRecruiter is at the forefront of this innovation, but others are experimenting with it as well.

Feature 4: Shows You What the Robots See

All job sites use robots to try to extract who you are from your resume. However, most of those sites won't show you the output, and the unfortunate truth is that most of these robots aren't very good at it. The average resume parser is only about 60% accurate in interpreting resumes.³ To have any hope of getting the right job recommendations, you need to be able to review what the robot extracted, and make corrections if the robot got it wrong.

Look for sites that tur...