There are a lot of reasons to feel lost when you find yourself looking for a new job. The job market is flooded with people who are young, skilled, and tired of living at home. Today’s unemployed job seeker also faces the unique problem of competing with the under-employed. A term some of us might be all too familiar with these days, being under-employed basically means that you’re not utilizing your full potential based on the amount of training/experience you have and the job you had to settle for.
Gone are the days of faxing your resume to a potential employer or cold-calling to see if you could speak with someone about open positions. Job listings are readily posted online for all to see but with added security it requires and the (sometimes falsely) perceived ease of use, it can be daunting to spend 15 minutes on an application for nothing more than an automated response that someone somewhere is maybe looking at your resume and maybe they will get back to you.
If there is anything I’ve learned from many years of job searching, it’s this:
- Recommendations are your king
- You can never be seen in too many places
- How you follow up will make you stand out
Perhaps more important than these three tips is the fact that you must keep constant vigil over your own personal brand. No one will know how hard you work or how awesome of an employee you are unless you make it apparent in more ways than telling someone in an interview. More so, if you don’t get ahead of the competition on these fronts, the odds are you won’t even make it to the interview anyway.
In pursuing these truths in job searching, there are more than enough fun and interesting tech tools to keep you busy and here are few that can help you on your way.
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. This is how you will keep in touch with the people who will decide your fate. If you’re a social networker, think of LinkedIn as your office space. Keep it clean, tidy and productive. Here, you can set yourself up for success. LinkedIn, like a few other social networks, has honed in on one of the most amazing/simple features of technology, allowing you to see when others visit your page. Extra tip! Always get business cards from every person you meet. Then go home, stalk them on LinkedIn, and use their email address to get a “confirm.”
Glassdoor
There are plenty of cool job seeker tools on Glassdoor. You can search for jobs, see where your acquaintances work, check up employee reviews, and compare salaries. Most people know that when you go into a job interview you need to be well-read on a company, but you should also go in with a realistic and well thought out idea of what to expect in a salary or wage. This conversation usually doesn’t come up before the final steps of getting a new job, but you definitely don’t want to get caught off guard if it comes up sooner.
Indeed
My mecca of job search engines. This aggregator site pulls from all across the web. Some might fault it for its sometimes scattered search results. But in my experience, sometimes you aren’t that picky about where you’re applying and wider breadth of options wouldn’t hurt.
Levo League
Levo League describes itself as a “community dedicated to career success.” With a focus on women, this site lets you search for job listings as well as connect with a mentor. As an added bonus, they write educational posts about women in the modern workplace with tips on everything from fashion to technology. They also feature posts from successful women working today who give free advice and life lessons that are applicable and interesting.
Wix
Having an online resume or portfolio website is easy to do and invaluable to your job search. While you need to be putting yourself out there, there needs to be a place where people go and find you too. If the thought of building a website scares you, Wix is a site that lets you pretend like you know what you’re doing. Once you get your site in working order, slap that URL in your email signature and every social site you have. The more places it can be found, the more often it will be.
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What are your job search tips? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @litdarling!
I agree that LinkedIn is a great networking tool when looking for a job. Because of this it is important to keep your LinkedIn up to date and in a professional manner – which a lot of job seekers neglect to do. Since there are so many different portals to job searching I like how you have outlined simply the most modern, useful job searching/networking tools on the web.