“Job Hunting in the Age of Blaze” is a guidebook for job hunters providing information on steering your job search in a world where classified newspaper ads have been replaced with an array of online tools and services.  Additionally, I offer a perspective  on how job hunters are perceived by recruiters and hiring managers - those critical decision-makers who are on the frontlines of hiring. The Author, Rebecca Davis, offers a unique twist on job-hunting fact and fiction that reflects her extensive experience in the hiring hot seat. She focuses on what employers look for as they electronically  leaf through resumes, and how job hunters can effectively market their resumes online to stand out against hundreds of emails and job board postings. “Age of Blaze” discusses the "job identification process," how to network and uncover opportunities using tactics very similar to those a recruiter uses when searching for employees. Rebecca discuss the variety of recruiters who work in employment, and how to both identify and leverage recruiter contacts effectively. Finally, she treats interviewing and salary negotiation in detail, providing specific information on which interview and negotiation tactics work, and which emphatically do not.

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SAMPLE EXCERPTS FROM "Job Hunting in the Age of Blaze"

About Web Postings: INSIDER TIP: When candidates see that a posting is over a month old, they often don't bother to respond. What they don't realize is that usually, if the posting is still up on the board, it's still active. We pay for that "posting space," so if the job has been filled, it behooves us to replace the job with another one that we need to attack. And of course we have no desire to spend our time responding to people for a job we don't really have.

ABOUT FUNCTIONAL RESUMES: Functional resumes are resumes that focus on the skills that you bring to the table rather than your job history. They might, for instance break down into four sections that include "leadership," "project management," "strategic capability" and "communications." These resumes then summarize experience in each area, and at the end of the resume a brief chronology is sometimes offered. Candidates who are changing careers are often encouraged to write functional resumes, but I also see others (for some reason, marketing people seem to be particularly susceptible to their usage) fall victim to the functional resume mistake. I suspect this is because marketing candidates are trying to distinguish themselves more creatively from the "pack," but the only distinction these resumes garner is a faster trip to the waste basket.

INSIDER TIP: I have never, ever met a hiring manager in my life who liked functional resumes. I have known several who immediately discard them. As hiring professionals, we want to know where you've worked, and what you've done. We don't want to spend several minutes trying to piece your background together.

Even if you're switching careers, the functional resume will do you a disservice. In this case, write a summary of qualifications that articulates your transferable skills, specify what you're after in your objective, and tailor the content of the jobs you've been in to reflect your capability to perform the job you're applying for. But do not compose a page of skills and then offer a four-line chronology on the second page. This looks like you're trying to hide something, and even if you are you will be better served by rephrasing rather than camouflaging. I can truthfully say that I have never brought a candidate in for an interview who forwarded a functional resume. And I can remember two occasions when I did call marketing candidates who wrote their resumes using this format, and though I liked them over the phone and thought them qualified, the hiring manager herself disliked the format so much those candidates never got their feet in the door.