career

There are 2 posts tagged career.

The tech-enabled job hunt

Tracking job opportunities can be tedious, particularly when companies use static pages to list their vacancies. The following methods can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your online search.

Tracking jobs with RSS feeds

The best option for tracking jobs, of course, is through the company’s own RSS feeds. Many companies provide said feeds, and in this case it’s simple: visit the site, subscribe with your newsreader, and wait for new opportunities to roll in.

Nice – but what about the (vast majority) of companies that don’t provide feeds?

Tracking jobs with OmniWeb

With its ability to periodically check your bookmarked sites for changes, OmniWeb (Mac only) can be an invaluable tool in the job hunt. Simply set your bookmarks and let it do the legwork for you.

Workflow:

  • Find an organization of interest

  • Bookmark the organization’s HR page, setting OmniWeb to check for changes daily

  • Monitor your Dock for OmniWeb bookmark updates

This is, incidentally, the method by which I found my first job in D.C. It works with the majority of companies I’ve looked at.

Creating custom job feeds

A third option is to create your own RSS feed for a company or organization. Feedity and Dapper allow you to create custom feeds from web pages. Dapper is a more powerful service, but Feedity is simpler to set up and doesn’t require an account, so I’ll use Feedity in this example.

Suppose you’re looking for a job with the Omni Group. (In reality, they already provide a job feed; we’ll just pretend they don’t for the sake of example.)

  • Find the HR page and copy the URL.


  • Go to Feedity.com and paste the URL in the main field. (If you have the Feedity bookmarklet installed, a single click from the HR page will do this for you.) Select a category for the feed and choose “Preview”:



    Feedity will show you the links it has extracted; this represents the content that will show up in its RSS feed. If you’re not satisfied with the results, select “Try refining…” to hone in on the results you want to appear in your subscription.


  • When you’re ready, you can subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon, or select from their other subscription options:

Limitations

Some job sites are more interested in tracking you than letting you track them. This can be a problem if each visit results in unique page URLs being generated for the job pages. In this case, Feedity will think each job is new every time it crawls the site — so you’ll get duplicates.

In cases like this, try using OmniWeb, or see if you can get results out of Monster, LinkedIn, etc.

Jobfox

Jobfox provides some interesting offerings in the career marketing/job hunting field.  Unlike the traditional resume board model pioneered by Monster and others, Jobfox attempts to create more holistic profiles of both job seekers and employers, then provides opportunity matches that may be a better fit.

During the profile creation process, Jobfox leads users through specific areas of job experience as well as a host of employment-related preferences, from dress code to specific preferred benefits.

For me, answering the step-by-step questionnaires was valuable; the process helped me identify some skills that I had never specifically noted. Once complete, users end up with a personal profile page as well as an “inbox”, where you can see job matches that are the closest fit to your preferences, experience, requirements, etc.

One particularly interesting feature of your Jobfox profile page is an ‘experience map’, which displays your areas of experience and expertise in a mind map-like visualization.

Notably absent from Jobfox are any networking features. I guess I’ll hang on to LinkedIn for networking, recommendations, etc.

To see my Jobfox page, click here: http://www.jobfox.com/people/danbyler