robotgeek

I’ve been job hunting for some time now, so here are a few tech tips to help you to apply for jobs more effectively. This post will only cover the technical aspects, and **will not** land you a job. That is probably evident as I am still job hunting

**Search Smart, Search Quick**

There are sites like Monster, Careerbuilder, hotjobs etc. Don’t waste your time searching all these sites. Pick a search engine like [[http://www.indeed.com Indeed]] which searches all of those sites, company sites and more. Customize your search using keywords.

**Get Notified of New Jobs**

Don’t waste time searching for jobs, get notified if there are possible matches. If you followed the above step, you should have a Rss feed that you can add to your feedreader.

Use a RSS feed reader like [[www.rssowl.org RssOwl]] on Windows, or [[akregator.sourceforge.net/ Akregator]] on Linux. Firefox users can use the Live Bookmarks facility if they can archive well.

** Track your Progress **
This is a very important step. The easiest way to do this is to have a easy place to take notes, store job descriptions, categorize jobs for follow up, jobs to apply etc. You could do this in a text document, word document or a spreadsheet, but its is “cleaner” to use [[http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DesktopEdition MoinMoin Desktop Edition]].

Why? Wikis are easy to edit, and easy to use. Search is built right in.

Getting this to work smoothly is not so obvious. Fear not, it is pretty simple with the use of macros and templates. Here is what my wiki looks like (with company names scrubbed out). Will post the wiki markups if requested.

{{image class=”center” alt=”My jobsearch wiki” title=”Jobsearch Wiki Homepage” url=”http://robotgeek.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/jobsearchhome.thumbnail.png” link=”http://robotgeek.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/jobsearchhome.png”}}

Type the company name, and click the “Add new job” button to add the listing for a new job. I also have a template for entering details of new jobs and tracking status.

Changing the category of the job listing will make the job appear under other categories on the front page.

** Conclusion **
The combination of good search engines, rss feeds and wikis can make the jobsearch process faster and more organized. The time invested in using these techniques will hopefully allows to do more in less time.