Great news! We got a new author for our blog, and not just an author, we got Karalyn Brown writing for us! Karalyn Brown is a resume, interview and job search consultant based in Australia. She’s also an online careers agony aunty, writes frequently on career issues for a major Australian newspaper and talks job search tactics on the national broadcaster. She gets a real buzz out of helping people find jobs. Please visit her blog InterviewIQ and follow her on Twitter @InterviewIQ. Here’s the first article she wrote for us…

I shouldn’t be writing this, given I write resumes for a living, however there are certain times in your career when your super snappy resume will only take you so far. If you’ve persisted and persisted and you still can’t find a job, it’s likely there are a whole host of things happening. Take a look at this list for a start.

1. There are just too many of you in the market place. Think recent graduate or the other end of the career ladder, too many generals and not enough armies.

2. There is not enough of your job. Your industry is dying. Your skills are no longer needed. You haven’t kept up to date with technology or terminology.

3. You are only relying on replying to advertisements to look for a job. That’s probably roughly only 20% of the job market.

4. You don’t understand what the job is about. This may sound weird, but even if you think you understand the job advertisement you probably don’t. HR just love management speak. An advertisement with the words “servicing stakeholders” may mean handling large volumes of calls in a call centre, or negotiating service level agreements for internal service providers. Read this post on translating HR speak for some tips on understanding advertisements.

5. You don’t have the skills and nobody has told you. Many organizations are risk averse nowadays. In performance reviews managers can describe things such as weaknesses as “development areas.” That’s a fine term if it is possible you may develop the skill. But it’s misleading if you have no potential or desire to develop that talent. If you are given feedback about your performance in a role, make sure you ask for examples around what that feedback means. That way you can understand yourself better and know if you are on the right career path.

6. You are doing something annoying when you speak to a recruiter. Perhaps you don’t listen. Or you talk too much or talk too little. You’ve not prepared for the interview or you show no interest in the role.

7. You have a “fixation” and you think it’s everyone else’s problem. You say you are too old, too female, too industry specific, too young, too government, too whatever… Yes discrimination does exist. In some places it’s awful. But before you go down the damaging path of making your inability to find a job about recruiters’ or employers’ attitudes, make sure it’s not any of the things I’ve just mentioned.

I say this because fixations can be blinding. They can get in the way of you accepting the real truth about the problem. You may react badly to simple questions from an interviewer or see questions as meaning something different from the way the questioner intended. Then you get defensive. Your mind can play amazing tricks on you when you think the world is biased. Don’t fall into that trap.

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