Yes, You CAN Get a Job by Applying Online: FOUR Key Steps ... with Mary McCoy

Many people believe that applying for jobs online is sending information into a black hole. Can job seekers make it work? We asked Mary McCoy, an executive coach who focuses on helping leaders through the transitions that result from promotion, primarily Director to VP. As a leader at Hewlett Packard, Mary was known for her ability to grow revenue in new product lines. 

This video is part of the Believe Show.

To view the entire interview, click here or play the embedded video below.

Senia: What do you believe that others might not agree with?

Mary: I believe that you can get a job simply by applying online. I say simply, but it's really not that simple. The tradition has been that the best way to get a job is to use your network, and that does help. But if you don't know anyone in the field that you're trying to pivot into, applying online does not have to be a black hole.

Senia: How did you come to this belief? 

Mary: I have observed some tricks of the trade that help when applying online. The initial idea of applying online was to make the whole process more efficient. It did exactly the opposite. It made the process wildly inefficient because everybody was applying for everything. The people who only wanted to hire one person then had to sort through thousands of applications. That might have given them many more qualified candidates than they used to get, but sorting through them was extremely difficult. The response was to put artificial intelligence robots in place to sort through the thousands of applications. Anybody who didn't know the tricks of the robots immediately got eliminated. That's why people who apply online blindly call it the black hole. They apply and get nowhere.

There are ways to create applications that work well. First, streamline your resume and your LinkedIn profile. 

1) Start with Your Resume

A) FONT SIZE AND TYPE. The AI robots can't read a font size less than 11. If you're using a 10.5 font, a robot might pick up every other word or maybe no words at all. The robots also do better with sans-serif fonts. Use a font like Ariel (sans-serif) rather than Times New Roman (serif).

B) NO FANCY FORMATTING. Don’t use tables or graphs or pictures. My marketing clients love to put these in their resumes because the resumes look better. Create a different resume to take to the interview. The AI robots just delete tables. If that table has your skills in it, you’re out of luck because skills are the keywords that the robot uses to determine if your application floats up to the top 100 of the 1000 that were submitted. Put your skills in your resume in a simple list. Say, "Skills and expertise," and list a skill, put a vertical bar, then another skill, and so on. Put two spaces around each of the vertical bars. Then the robot can very quickly find your skills.

C) HOW TO WRITE (AND LABEL) THE "OBJECTIVES" SUMMARY. Make sure that the summary or objectives at the top of your resume is a combination of who you are and what you're looking for. If they're the same, that's obviously easier. But it’s okay if they’re different. Say both. Finally, if you have the ability to customize your resume, label that top summary paragraph with the title of the job you’re applying for. It could be Regional Sales Manager or you could change it to Territory Sales Manager when you apply for a different job.

2) Your LinkedIn Profile

A) USE THE 3-5X FACTOR TO GET MATCHED TO YOUR JOB. The headline in LinkedIn is another place where you can put a combination of what you are and what you want to be. It could be Program Manager, Project Manager, Agile Scrum Master. That headline receives a much higher priority during LinkedIn job matching than anything else in your LinkedIn profile by a factor of three to five.

B) DO NOT GO WITH THE DEFAULT, YOUR LAST JOB. If you’re applying for two different specialties, put them both in your headline separated by a vertical bar. You have 180 characters there that you can use however you want. By default, LinkedIn will pull up what your last job was, and that's the worst use of that line. The best use is to put words that you’d want a recruiter to use to find you. If your current role is what you’re looking for, list it. But don’t say “[current role] at Hewlett Packard Corporation." The company name is a waste of characters.

3) Show Where You Want to Go

Resumes and LinkedIn details show where you have been. They are the official record, especially a resume. Never lie. But use the LinkedIn headline and the first resume section to show where you want to go, especially if you're pivoting from one career to another. If you want to move from being a project manager to a scrum master, then you really want to make good use of that first paragraph and the headline in LinkedIn because that will signal that you're pivoting.

4) Apply, Apply, Apply

A) APPLY UNTIL YOU GET TO THE MAGIC NUMBER. Pick one or two aggregators like LinkedIn or Indeed, my two favorites. Almost any job posted anywhere will be listed in these two. You can apply in both of them. Depending on what you're looking for, some jobs are more prevalent in Indeed, others more prevalent in LinkedIn.

The reason I say apply, apply, apply is because you want to tell the system what you're looking for and that you're ready. When you get to about 40 job applications, LinkedIn realizes that you're really looking for something. Then somehow you get sorted more toward the top when recruiters are searching because the system knows what you're looking for. I sometimes suggest that people apply even for jobs that aren’t perfect to get to that 40 number. Yes, that exacerbates the inefficiencies of the system, but we can't fix everything. Go for it: apply, apply, apply.

My clients will say, "Wow, I just got to 40, and a recruiter called me out of the blue." It really wasn't out of the blue. It was because they’d been out there looking. The systems look for people who have been looking.

If you really don’t know what you want, I don’t recommend applying just to find out. If you haven't decided whether you want to be a healthcare worker or a project manager or an IT specialist, all that applying will teach the system that you don't know what you're doing.

Once you've determined your pathway, get your resume ready, get your LinkedIn profile ready, and apply, apply, apply.

B) CHANGE YOUR BACKGROUND TO SOMETHING FUN / MEANINGFUL. On LinkedIn, I advise you to change your background. Recruiters get tired of looking at the default background. Put something there that’s different and perhaps says something about who you are. If a recruiter were to say to you, "Tell me what that background means," you might have an interesting story. Recruiters see that default background so much as they flip through the people that come up. 

Senia: Wow, what valuable suggestions, Mary, and counterintuitive in many ways! Once people do apply in these ways, what else should they be ready for?

Mary: The whole point of applying online is to get noticed and interviewed.

Preparing for Interviews

The big trick question in interviews that everybody gets is, “Tell me about yourself.” What they don't want is your life history. What they do want to know is why you are good for this job. How are you going to make them successful? What is your key value add? What do you bring that nobody else brings? Be thoughtful about the way you answer that question, and do it in 90 seconds or less. They just want to know how you're going to make their company better.

Networking is Still Important

If it's a job that you are particularly interested in, I do advise also networking. Use LinkedIn to find who else works there and then reach out to them, whether you know them or not.

There are three groups of people, about a third in each group. The first group are collaborators and connectors who will always write back. The next group are obligates who say that they're going to write back but never quite get around to it. The third group are curmudgeons who are never going to write back. Thus the chances are one in three that someone you don't know will write back to you, but that’s still pretty good odds.

Never ask them to help you get a job. You might say, "I want 10 minutes of your time to do an informational interview to better understand your company." You may or may not tell them that you are searching for a job.  Always end with, "Is there anyone else in your company that you recommend I talk to?" You could say, "I did apply for this job. Do you happen to know the hiring manager?" 

Use LinkedIn to figure out who to network with, and don't be afraid to write to people you've never met. It helps to pick people with whom you have something in common. If they graduated from the same college, they're more likely to write back. They don’t even have to be connected to you. You can use InMail if you're not directly connected.

Senia: What’s one thought that you would like to leave with people?

Mary: First, Thank you for giving me a chance to share these unwritten rules.

Don't be afraid to apply online. Be willing to tackle it. When you apply to 40 jobs, you're probably only going to hear back 3 to 5 of them. But you only need one job. If you get rejection after rejection, remember you only need one job. You are only one email, one interview, one negotiation away from your dream job. Stay focused and keep at it.

Senia: If you could snap your fingers and almost everybody in the world were to take some action, what would you want that action to be?

Mary:  I would want people to listen and unite. These are my unity pearls. Whether I supported or voted for the existing president or not is immaterial, but I do think we need to unite. So be kind and unite because we'll all be stronger for it.

Senia's Note: Mary and I would love to know other suggestions YOU have uncovered. What else should people do to increase their chances when they apply online? Please drop a suggestion or two in the comments.

Image from Canva, as "job application online."

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