Jay Bhatti, co-founder and VP of development at search engine Spock.com, has five tips job seekers can use to maintain an edge over competitors and use the Web to their advantage:
Know What’s Publicly Available – Execunet.com conducted a survey of 100 executive recruiters, noting that 77 percent used sites such as Spock to learn more about a person and 35 percent of those had eliminated a candidate based on information uncovered. You should therefore get in the habit of regularly performing a Spock and Google search for your name and e-mail. Any information you see will represent what any good recruiter or hiring manager will look for before or after an interview. In this case it’s best to use a people specific search service, which will look deeper and is more likely to display information about you. Always remember to search for yourself by additional keywords such as location or university.
Along with checking your own online footprint, make sure to research some of your potential employers. Employee reviews sites such as JobVent and Criticat will save you time and help you avoid any scams or poor work environments.
Cast a Wide Net – Be aggressive in your search and post your resume in as many locations as possible. While sites such as Monster and Careerbuilder are great for advice and general search, you may be better off posting on smaller and more specific resume site such as SalesGravy or Dice.
Promote Yourself– While restricting access to embarrassing or inappropriate information is advisable, displaying your interests and hobbies on the Web is a great way for potential employers to get to know you better. Author Ellen Sautter notes, “Having an online identity is becoming increasingly important as a way to establish your credibility and personal brand and to attract career or business opportunities…” In today’s workplace, fitting in with a company culture and philosophy can be just as important as your qualifications. Therefore consider placing yourself on several different types of places on the Web. Keep in mind that you should remain consistent and professional on any site you join.
Optimize – Search engines are universally adopting the Google method of indexing unique and relevant content first. You should be optimizing your resume, blog or homepage in a similar fashion by being descriptive and creative with your keywords. This will ultimately help you optimize for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For any blogs add unique tags to a post so that you’ll get noticed by other readers. You’ll also want to comment on other people’s posts, which in turn should create links back to you. If you have a homepage, try to add keywords to the text title (the top bar across your browser).
Network - There’s a wealth of knowledge on the Internet so use it to your advantage. In addition to making your web presence felt, you should be networking with other people in your industry. Using professional sites such as Linkedin and Spock to connect, you should start taking part in forums, and checking out the latest trends. Jack Hinson in discussing how networking helped land him a job, told Margot Lester of Monster.com, “I’d spoken to the company’s founders about a year ago and stayed in touch…then I ran into one of them at a networking function”.
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November 19th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
There are some helpful tips here. The other site I would highly recommend looking at is LinkUp.com which aggregates and publishes jobs pulled directly from the career sections of company web sites themselves. There are roughly 500,000 from over 10,000 companies and the listings are always current, there are no duplicates, and there are no listings from staffing companies, headhunters, work-at-home scams, etc. When you apply to a position on the site, you are actually applying directly to that company’s web site or applicant tracking system. Perhaps more importantly, the search/match quality on LinkUp.com is much higher than any other job site because the job listings themselves are much longer and more thorough given that companies are posting the listings on their own company site. This allows for a much more granular, highly specific search query. And finally, the jobs found on LinkUp.com are often unadvertised anywhere else on the web. I of course am biased, but I’d argue that LinkUp is the best jobs site on the web today.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Since long before the wonders of modern telecommunications came along, the most important and precious attribute that any of us bring to both our personal and professional lives is our reputation. And as everyone knows, when it comes to any job, it is rarely about the knowledge to do a job, it is almost always about “fit” into the culture and with the team, and cyberspace provides and two-edged sword in terms of conveying to others (including recruiters) what a candidate’s DNA is really all about, be it for good or for ill.