Page 48 - James Caan - Get the Job you Really Want

what your key employer group is going to be targeting. I have
heard the general job boards described as ‘cattle markets’,
compared to the ‘quality farmers’ markets’ of the specialist job
boards. There are tools out there to help you select the most
e≠ective job boards for your needs: websites which track appli-

cant responses to ads and highlight the most e≠ective boards.
A word of warning: look around a job board first and get a
feel for the kind of jobs advertised, and just as with agencies,

talk to friends and colleagues who may have used the board to
see how e≠ective they found it. Posting your C V on a board or a
database is quick and easy, but it can go viral in a mouse-click.
You are no longer in control of who can see it. Or it may simply
disappear into a cyberspace loop and never be looked at by

anyone again. The net o≠ers quantity but not always quality.
And of course you can use the internet yourself to target
companies. If you happen to be, for the sake of argument,

working in FMCG, go on to Google and key in, ‘What are the top
twenty FMCG companies in the UK?’ You will find that somebody,
somewhere will have compiled a league table for a newspaper or
magazine and those top twenty names will come up.
Once you have found the names of those companies, head to

their individual company websites, where you will, more often
than not, find a Careers section. These corporate career pages are
now a standard element of major company websites: all the jobs

within companies such as Marks and Spencer, Shell or Unilever,
will be listed, but increasingly the same is true of mid-sized and
smaller companies. Don’t look once. Make a note to return on a
regular basis to the pages for companies you have targeted.

36 get the job you really want