When you’re job hunting, you can go mad if you think about the amount of factors beyond your control that affect your chances of getting hired. The economy, your location, industry trends – even the hiring manager’s mood – can influence whether or not you get a job. Still, as nice as it would be to blame your lack of offers on external factors, you can’t forget that the common denominator in your job hunt – from the résumé to the interview – is you.

Here are 25 ways you might be unknowingly sabotaging your own job search:

The first steps

1. Not keeping track of your accomplishments

When you’re happy with your job, it’s easy to forget about possible future job hunts. You never know when you’ll end up looking for new work, and if you don’t keep a running list of awards, promotions and accomplishments, you might not remember them when it’s time to update your résumé.

5. Searching only for the perfect job

Yes, your job search should be focused. After all, applying to every job posting that comes your way is a good way to waste time but not an effective way to find a job you want. However, if you approach your job hunt unwilling to accept anything less than the precise job title, pay, vacation time and hours you want, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. 

The résumé and cover letter

7. Typos

Sending a cover letter or résumé filled with grammatical mistakes and typographical errors shows hiring managers you don’t care about the quality of your work and probably not about the job, either. 

8. Including your current work info as the best place to contact you

Making sure employers can get in touch with you is important, but they shouldn’t be contacting you at work. “Potential employers are going to question if these people will search for a new job on their time,” says Kathy Sweeney, résumé writer for the Write Résumé. 

9. Focusing on yourself and not on the company in the cover letter

“When ‘I’ is the predominant subject – and there are times when it is the only subject of all the sentences in the cover letter ? it indicates to me that they don’t understand my organization and its needs, and, in fact, says they don’t care to know,” says Dion McInnis, associate vice president for university advancement at University of Houston-Clear Lake. “And therefore, I don’t care to know them.” 

The interview

13. Not asking questions

When the interview comes to a close, the hiring manager will undoubtedly ask if you have any questions for him or her. Not asking anything is the equivalent of saying, “I don’t care all that much about the job.” 

After the interview

21. Not sending a thank-you note

Interview etiquette extends beyond the goodbye handshake. Follow up with the interviewer by sending a thank-you note, either by e-mail or in the mail. Not only is it standard business practice, it’s also common courtesy. 

23. Not learning from your mistakes

Not every interview goes off without a hitch, so don’t beat yourself up if you flubbed an answer or two. However, if you don’t…

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Almost all of us think that Google is the premier search engine if you wish to find jobs in your city. Don’t be mistaken here, as Google is indeed the premier search engine, but to attribute the fact of being good in job searches may be a mistake. Challenging Google’s popularity is Yahoo Hot jobs, a user-friendly application that is voted the best by users, and recruiters alike.

Features of the yahoo hot jobs

For the user

• It allows you to post up to 10 different versions of their own resume, something that other applications hardly allow you to do.
• You can see the number of times; an employer actually viewed your resume. This should clearly tell you if employers like your candidacy or not.
• Add-on tools facilitate you in calculating ideal salaries, something that you would want to keep in mind before quoting salary expectations to the prospective employer.
• Should you not be in good terms with a company, maybe your previous company, use the Block option to prevent them from seeing your resume.
• Get hot tips of the day by signing in to yahoo hot jobs.

These reasons are enough to tell you why users rate yahoo hot jobs as the best.

For the recruiter

The features for the recruiter, though is not any different from the ones that are provided by other specialized job sites. Recruiters are able to add, delete or modify the jobs. They can also access a variety of templates and notes, which help them in their official communication.

Recruiters though have no hesitation in picking yahoo hot jobs as the clear winner only due to the fact that they get quality candidacies from them.

The story around the Internet is – Anything that yahoo does is available for free! It is true, at least in the case of yahoo hot jobs. Users and recruiters alike do not have to pay a dime for what yahoo hot jobs do for them. Well, not entirely true! as recruiters may need to pay a small fee for posting their vacancies. In the end, the small fee is worth it if you, as an employer is able to hire a quality candidate.

Search for job?

Inspired by all the talks on the power of the Internet, one would assume you are started with your activity to search the top jobs in Malaysia. Thinking that you would get 100 pages of listings of your favorite job! You are not entirely wrong in thinking so, with the only difference that the job searches can only give you some information while hiding some.

Why are job searches not successful?

The accuracy of the number of people visiting the Internet, especially Search engines cannot be successfully reported by any research organization. By conservative estimates, about 4 million people across the world visit search engines to search something or the other. With an average of about 10% people looking for jobs, about 4,000,000 people look for jobs daily!

There lies the problem! The best job sites often lose out on the popularity race due to factors like inadequate optimization of the Web pages, and selection of improper keywords. When a user types in “job searches” in the search engine section, trust he would find gazillion results, only for him to visit couple of links appearing on the first page.

What you see first is not always the best?

You could, easily mistake the first link you see on the search page result, for it being the best listing for your job. You would have thought your job searches would have come to an end! In reality, through the entire listing, and you would understand that your job searches might have to continue a little while longer.

Remember the last time when you went looking around for a job. Trust you would have logged in to the Internet and typed the word “job searches” on another relevant keyword. If you did so, chances are that you might not have succeeded. By the way, a report on search engine terms by a marketing organization mentions that only 15% of people are satisfied with their results on job searches.

Now, you know why job searches, especially over the Internet are not entirely successful. This is not to say you would not get a job listing that you were looking for, just that the probability of that happening is low!