About everything these people talked about. Be sure to leverage your time. Follow all of their bullet points, completely, then when it's done, stop. Know what time counts and what doesn't. Mulling over a resume for hours doesn't count except the first time. Getting face-to-face time does count. After an HR person or hiring manager browses resumes, they all look the same, they go "no... no... no... hmmm *flip*... no... no..." That's all you want, is that hmmm, and remember it's a capricious one every time.
By the time I got this position, I had a routine. I'd check dice, aztech-work, and craigslist.phoenix, and the individual companies in the Bloomberg Arizona 100 for positions. For each one which fit my skills, I immediately made a copy of my resume, and cut-paste the "summary" section with lines I had ready. The lower body of the resume was "common" stuff, the education and work experience sections, and chronology. The "summary" section exactly met what an HR person was looking for, and was tailor-made for each HR person. For extremely interesting positions, I would immediately find contact information, call them, and put them in my contact log. For others, I'd spam the resume away, and log them only if they called back. Sometimes companies will flippantly put reqs up and forget, I don't want to waste too much time with this, and this was the filter against that. All this was a goal of getting face-to-face time, to get me to round 1 of an interview, after that, it is all up to them, and your resume no longer plays a role. The log book had "last contact" time, so I could phone them then either refresh or trash ones that got old.
I got 9 round-1 interviews and 3 round-2 interviews. In the case of the round 2's, I got them all from direct postings, NOT recruiters. I followed everything to the letter perfectly, and didn't land, just because they chose the other candidate who also followed the routine to the letter.
For all positions I've had since 2003, I got them exclusively from PLUG contacts.
For the two positions which I did land and was forced to choose from, I got from Craigslist. I was actually rude to the hiring manager... actually, both CEOs of small companies... in one way or another, but for their own reasons, they pulled me in and refused to let me go. One I met in November, he offered low pay and mostly stock to work on a startup software project. I had already been burned by a maliciously psychopathic boss who fed me the same line before, plus the guy told me about the millions he lost in the dot-bomb, so I told him, "you have a destructive attitude", and took the contract at Pegasus. Last month this guy called me back, this time with a genuine high-paying salary, and even offered me a designer and an assistant for web projects. While I was mentally reeling over this offer, the other CEO called me and awoke me from deep delta-sleep at 12 in the afternoon on a Friday. I told him now was a bad time, could you please e-mail me, and flatly refused to talk further. This second CEO is the one I'm working for now, only they offered first. The first one is still open to me working there.
That's my anecdote to give you some hope. One other thing:
http://www.daveramsey.com/ . He's on 1310am from 1pm to 4pm. Should give you a good perspective on why you are working, ultimately, in life.
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