Online Job Searches Drown in a Sea of Applications.

As you can see, you really are competing against hundreds of other applicants for every open position. That is, if you're lucky, you'll be competing against hundreds of other applicants.

If you're not lucky, your application can easily get lost in a sea of faceless applications before anyone even looks at it long enough for you to be in competition for anything.

The problem isn't so much that you have such great competition, but that you have such awful competition.

If someone on other end even does look at your application, how likely is it that they will be looking at it with a fresh eye, excited at possibility of a great hire?

Job Search Websites Make It Hard to Distinguish Yourself.

You're just a series of filled-in form fields and rows of text. On most sites, you can't even adjust font of your resume. Your job website application may disappear into ether unread--and you'll never find out.

With a hundred applications per day, it's very easy for an email inbox to go over quota and bounce a few, or for a few sheets of printouts to fly into recycling bin prematurely. Most job search sites make it difficult or impossible to track status of an application beyond confirming that it was entered into system.

In short, when it comes to job search websites, hard work and persistence pay off. You have to cast a lot of lines very well before you even get a bite. Often it isn't so much best worker who gets job, but person most skilled at navigating application process.

The good news is that if you learn to approach job search website process from point of view of making life easier for a potential employer, you'll have an enormous advantage over other applicants.

When you start thinking about person on other side of "submit" button, you'll see potential flaws in your application that never would have appeared to you otherwise: how you can make your cover letter more concise and to-the-point, or how you could remove irrelevant time-wasting factoids from your resume.

Ready to get a fresh start with your applications by looking at them from an employer's perspective? Start re-planning your online job search now, before you forget.