Like pretty much everything else, the days of mailing hard copies of your resumé and cover letter to a company have given way to the internet. Typically, you will email your job application directly to a company’s recruiter or HR department. An organization will often have an online submission program in which you upload your documents to its online database. But once you email or submit it online, you will find yourself one of many minnows swimming in the huge internet ocean.

Your application will be thrown into the mix with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of others. Simply having a stellar work history won’t help you stand out in any significant way. If it is a bigger company, chances are your application will not even be read by a human. Your online application might be first filtered by a job application spider that is looking for job-specific keywords. At this point, you may be in the game, but your value as an applicant is low.

Give greater value to your online application

There are two important steps to creating a winning online application and get yourself noticed over the fray: Correct File Formatting and Targeted Content.

Correct File Formatting

A company will not hire you if they can’t read your job application. If the person trying to read your job application cannot open or read the file because it is in an improper format, he/she will simply throw it away. You must be sure to file documents that are in readable file formats such, as Microsoft Word “.doc” or “.pdf” format.

A “.pdf” is preferable because you can be sure the person reading your resume and cover letter will see it just as you do. Borders, bullet points, and other stylistic elements of layout will remain as you intended them. The aesthetic qualities of your job application will not suffer from you and your recruiter having incompatible versions of Microsoft Word.

IMPORTANT: If you are going to file a .pdf, be sure it is a readable .pdf and not an image. To tell if your pdf is readable, open it in any pdf reader (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) and attempt to copy a line of text and then pasting it into, for example, an email. If you can do this, it will be readable.

Targeted Job Application Content
In order to receive consideration for a job opening, your job application must be on point. This is not just about spell-checking. For each job to which you apply, you must edit your application so it accords closely with the job description, highlighting skills and experiences that would make you the ideal candidate for the job.

Look for important key words in the job posting. If the job post says the applicant must be “capable with Excel,” then make sure your application also says “capable with Excel” (that is if you really are; while slight embellishments are ok, blatant lying on your application will come back to bite you). This is where the importance of targeted content comes into play.

Online job applications may be crawled for keywords much in the same way websites are crawled by spiders and robots. So, rhetorically, “proficient with spreadsheets” and “capable with Excel” mean the same thing, but to a robots sifting through the glut of applications, your words will not register as a match.

To summarize, a competitive job application must be in a proper, readable format – such as a .doc or readable .pdf (not an image) – and its words must be specifically edited for each job.

While necessary to give yourself an edge in the hiring process, this work is by no means sufficient. You could have the perfect job application, an impressive resume and crisp cover letter, and still not even get an interview. Developing a successful online job application is just the beginning. The important work is yet to come.

In the next post on Fastest Job Search, we will discuss the second step on your way to being hired for the right job: “Start a Job Search Management System.”



iTickleMe Job Search GUARANTEE:
Follow this plan for 4 months, initiating at least 10 new contacts every day (this is easy once you get the hang of it). If you don’t have a job at the end of 4 months of implementing this program and you wish to discontinue service, simply notify us at support@iTickleMe.com and we will refund your $19.95 in full! You have nothing to lose, and a lifetime of rewarding employment to gain. You owe it to yourself and your family to sign up right now!

The most powerful tool you can have in your job search is iTickleMe Email Reminders. Try it for free!

• You know how to create a Job Search Follow-up Email. You know that it contains everything you will need to perform an effective job search follow-up.
• You know how to send Job Search Follow-up Emails to yourself using iTickleMe.
• You have placed “template” copies of your resume, cover letter, follow-up letter and thank you letter in a folder entitled “$$-MasterTemplates”
• You know how to launch any of your master templates with 3-key shortcuts.

There is one more piece of the infrastructure you should now do. Create a folder entitled “$$-JobSearch“. This will house all of your ongoing job search correspondences including customized resumes, cover letters, follow-ups and thank yous.

When you are online looking for prospects and you find a likely company, read their job posting carefully. Open a new Job Search Follow-up Email and paste the posting into the email. You will keep this email open until you have populated it with all the info you will need in the future to perform an effective job search follow-up.

In Subject Line of Job Search Follow-up Email, enter:     Job Search: CompanyName

Open your Resume template by pressing Control+Alt+R together.
Open your Cover letter template by pressing Control+Alt+C together.

IMPORTANT: Immediately rename template files using the naming system described below
and save them in the $$-JobSearch folder

You now have both files and your Job Search Follow-up Email open. Soon you will modify the resume and cover letter so that they fulfill the requirements of the job posting as much as possible. But first (and then again when you are finished with the mods) it is time to save them in a way that it will be easy to find and use in the future.

Efficient work flow – File naming for maximum advantage
Modify the file names as follows before saving them in the $$-JobSearch folder. Do NOT save them on top of your original templates. (Keep a backup of original templates just in case).

Rename resume file thus:        yymmdd-MyNameResume-CompanyName
Rename cover letter file thus:     yymmdd-MyNameCover-CompanyName

Save both of them in the $$-JobSearch folder.

Use this date format: YYMMDD
YYMMDD means the date, represented as follows:

Force yourself to prefix all files with this date format. When you open the folder, all entries will be chronologically ordered. This will become very handy when files accumulate. It will also tell you when you first initiated the first contact with a new prospect.

Also, when you rename your resume and cover, put the company name at the end, where we show “CompanyName”. Thus, if Joe Smith were to file a resume and cover letter with Kraft Foods on March 19, 2010, the file names would be:

100319-JoeSmithResume-Kraft
100319-JoeSmithCover-Kraft

You have now loaded the file name with great info that will help you in your future work flow. The file name is professional enough that you will have no problem emailing the file with this exact file name to your Target Hiring Person. The reason your own name is embedded in the file name is for the benefit of the Target Hiring Person. It will help them locate your resume in the future if needed.

When you are asked in an online job application, to attach your resume, you will easily be able to browse to the correct file and attach it, because you will see the current date and the company name.

Modify the resume and cover letter to match, as closely as possible, the requirements of the job posting. See Step 1: Successful Online Job Application for more on this topic. If you are planning to file a pdf instead of a doc file, now is the time to convert the doc to pdf. Save the pdf to the same folder ($$-JobSearch), using the same file name as the original. When you do this, they will stay adjacent to one another in Windows Explorer and be easier to find and modify if necessary.

The home stretch
Add your cover letter and resume to your Job Search Follow-up Email, either as attachments, or simply pasted-in, your choice. The job posting should already be in the email as discussed above. Do some research to find the Target Hiring Person and add that person’s name, address and phone number to the top of the Job Search Follow-up Email. Select your next task, such as “Phone call in 2w” (2 weeks), and enter that at the top of the email. Then send the email to iTickleMe for return to you in the interval you want. In this case the email address would be “2w@iTickleMe.com”

You have now initiated two important job search activities. You have entered your job application in the way everyone else does, through the Internet. You have also programmed a follow-up aimed at the Target Hiring Person. This second path will lead you to places the rest of your competition does not dare to go: the alternate paths of communication that build relationships and ultimately get you a job!

iTickleMe Job Search GUARANTEE:
Follow this plan for 4 months, initiating at least 10 new contacts every day (this is easy once you get the hang of it). If you don’t have a job at the end of 4 months of implementing this program and you wish to discontinue service, simply notify us at support@iTickleMe.com and we will refund your $19.95 in full! You have nothing to lose, and a lifetime of rewarding employment to gain. You owe it to yourself and your family to sign up right now!