Inbound Marketing for a Job Search

I’ve written several articles about creating an online presence that you can leverage in your job search.  The idea is to develop a brand that leads hiring managers to you, rather than try to get their attention sending out resumes.  You can do this through blogs, webpages, social media sites, LinkedIn, and numerous other tools.

Building a brand that can help your job search can’t be done overnight.  It requires work over a period of months to be effective.  Fortunately, it doesn’t require much time on a daily basis.

I bring this topic up again because I ran into a great article about Inbound Marketing for a job search.  Inbound Marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on allowing customers to find you.  Most marketing is outbound in nature.  Advertising, cold calls, and direct mail are all outbound marketing techniques.  They rely on the company contacting the prospect.  Inbound marketing relies on positioning the company to get found by prospects that are looking to buy.

In a job search, hiring managers actively look to find the best candidate.  Most candidates market themselves by sending resumes in response to job posting – an active marketing technique.  This technique puts your resume in a stack with everyone else.

An inbound approach would be to author a blog or website on your industry so that hiring managers find you when they look for industry experts.  This technique also allows you to build relationships with people that can influence your search by recommending you to hiring managers.

A key reason why this approach works is that it is difficult to execute.  Most people will not take the time to build an online presence.  The effort required might only be a few minutes a day, but few will commit to this.  Those that do will standout from their competition.

Take a look at the Inbound Marketing article for your job search.  I’ve run into several people recently that landed jobs directly as a result of these techniques.  They work, but they take time and effort to implement.