Well, I've spent approximately one month searching for a job and about 3 weeks without one. I doubt I'm anywhere near a 'pro' yet but there are a few things I've learned along the way
that I think might be useful to others without jobs. As an aside, a protip is sort of an internet meme
which apparently goes back to a Doom video game guide which gave an overly obvious 'protip' (see picture to the right for the humor).
Protip: Networking
The first place I looked was within my inner circle of friends within the web community. Having worked at a couple different companies in the past few years I first checked there. I also have a couple friends in the area, on Twitter, that I checked with. Here's a great example of a tweet I followed up on. Also, if you let people know that you're looking for a job, often times they'll keep an extra set of eyes open for you, doubling your search effort. I found out about one job due to a co-worker hearing it on the radio and scribbling it on a piece of paper for me.
Protip: RSS Feeds!
I found many, many jobs via RSS feeds. If you're not familiar with RSS feeds yet, they're sort of like being sent an email every time something on a website gets updated.
Check out this video which explains them in more detail. Sometimes it requires a little digging, but most big name sites have RSS feeds now. Careerbuilder, Monster, Craigslist, Dice &
Jobster all have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to. I've even created a Career Builder RSS Feed Generator on my site if you want to get started. By subscribing to RSS feeds I'm alerted
of roughly 80 jobs per day from around Wisconsin.
Protip: Optimize Your Resume
I would estimate that Careerbuilder probably has the highest amount of job postings. Because of this, the better you are at using it, the more exposed you can become for future employers. An old co-worker of mine discovered that you can apply search engine optimization techniques to your Careerbuilder resume by sprinkling in a few keywords here and there. This works great for programming languages that you may know or have worked with, but may also apply to other sought after skills in your specific industry.
For me it was essentially tossing in every programming languages I have ever used i.e.: HTML, CSS, ASP, ASP.NET, SQL, PHP, XML, XSL, VBScript, VB.NET, JavaScript, jQuery, Java, C++.
By doing this, HR workers looking for candidates will often search on one of these keywords and my resume will likely show up in the results.
Protip: Bumping Your Resume To The Top
Another trick I learned was Careerbuilder sorts resumes by the last modified date. This means you may have a perfectly relevant resume but if you haven't updated it in a month, other resumes might be showing up before yours. To solve this, try to make a slight modification to your resume each day to keep it fresh. It could be something as simple as moving a sentence around.
I discovered this on accident. Basically I hadn't updated my resume in a long time and I noticed very few people were looking at it. Then when I was told that I lost my job, I made a few changes to it. The next day my 'view counter' had gone up dramatically (see below).
Protip: Develop A Schedule For Each Day
This is something I had good intentions with when I was finally unemployed, but I had a hard time sticking with it. Originally I made a schedule that I could adhere to each day to 'keep me busy'. My original schedule looked something like this:
- 7:30 - wake up
- 8:30 - work out
- 9:30 - look for job
- 11:00 - free time
- 12:00 - lunch
- 1:00 - learn new web technology
- 2:00 - free time
- 3:00 - look for job
- ...
What I found was I was starting to stay up maybe, a half an hour later each night and was starting to wake up later each day. This can turn into a bad habit (especially when you have people calling you at 9:00 in the morning to schedule an interview). To counter-act this, I recommend setting your alarm clock each day and trying to stick to a schedule if you can do it.
Protip: Document Everything & Stay Organized
You might find that you're applying for dozens of jobs. After awhile it gets hard to keep track of everything you've applied to. If you apply for a job, and do not hear back from somebody within a week, I'd recommend emailing them to check on the status of your application. If you keep an excel spreadsheet of all the jobs you've applied for and the date, as well as the contact information, this will help you stay on schedule. I'd also would save a copy of the job posting of each job I applied for. The reason being, is many times jobs will expire and you will no longer be able to view the posting. If that company called you for an interview it'd be pretty hard to prepare for it without the posting.
In Closing...
Well hopefully this blog post was helpful. Losing a job sucks and if there's anytime you need to give it 110% it's now. Thanks for reading!