Monday, April 13, 2009

Best Practices in job search

One of my goals in starting this blog is the documentation of "best practices" in job search as they are discovered by people looking for work. One of those just popped up.

As previously mentioned, we have a weekly group that meets every Wednesday (3:00 at the Green Bean coffee shop). One of the participants came in a week ago with report of a phone conversation with a potential employer who is considering opening a new office in the Seattle area. As you may well guess, we wanted to understand how that happened and so got him to describe his process. It went like this
· He started by setting up a Google Alert on his industry with results delivered to his email daily.
· While reading through this about a month ago, he discovered an article from a Kansas City Paper that documented a company from KC that was considering opening an office in Seattle.
· He followed up with an email to the company
· And added an Alert on the company to his Google Alerts

The email was followed up with first one and then a second extended phone conversation, then a product demo and this week he’s scheduled to have coffee with the individual responsible for opening the Seattle Office.

Our guy does not know for a fact that he is the only person talking about a Seattle office, but he is one of the very few, and there has not been any kind of advertisement yet about a potential position or asking people to apply. Instead, he is developing the kind of trust relationship that great jobs are built on.

I’ve set up my own Google Alert on job search and a couple of great sites were identified.

· Discover your Winning Ways – Handling your emotions
· Let’s Get Going – this is a group in North Carolina doing stuff similar to what we do. Been at it longer, so has some great learnings to share.

Take care
Steve

1 comment:

  1. I've helped a number of people set up job searches on Google Alerts, and the single most popular tip has been to monitor job pages on individual sites. This can be done with an alert for their keywords and the word job in the page's URL:
    online marketing inurl:job

    While the idea of Google Alerts is simple, the syntax details can really trip people up.I have consolidated a lot of my best tips into a free Google Alerts Tutorial:
    http://www.alertrank.com/google-alerts-tutorial.html

    ReplyDelete