A friend of mine came to me and asked me advice on his job situation.

If jobs were advertised there would hundreds if not thousands of people applying and he was "just any candidate with a CV".  He had tried all those things like producing a CV on yellow paper etc, but everybody does that now.

He would get called up by recruitment consultants but felt he was either a "piece of meat" where he was put forward for roles that were not applicable just so the recruitment consultant can make his numbers.

Other jobs, the interview process just went on and on with the client deciding on not hiring.

My advice was to take back control of the hiring process.

The solutions was as follows:-

1. Get a personal brand, so when recruiters and hirers are searching online you stand out.  The critical thing is that you are an expert and your Linkedin profile needs to show that.

One of the tricks about writing your personal brand is writing it in a way to filter out the people who will never like you, filter out the people who will never buy from you. 

2.  Grow your network in area where you want to work.  I've always been told that "it's not what you know, but who you know" and that is even more so in the world of digital job search.

Why not target the people, you would like to work for, target the companies you would like to work for.

My advice is NOT to approach people and say "have you got a job?", nobody likes a pitch.  As with anything on social.  While people call it social selling, it's not actually selling on social.

3. Write blogs - The best way to demonstrate your expertise is to write about it.  Interestingly all the people we have advised on this who have written blogs have been approached for roles.

Just like with social selling, you would expect to get inbound of leads (and we do) you would also expect inbound of job offers.

One person we advised got 5 inbound offers of a jobs as soon as she had changed her profile as we recommend above.

Good luck in your job hunting.