Feed Week – Tools for the Semi-Active Jobseeker

So, you find scanning the jobs boards on daily basis tedious.  What to do?  You could post a resume on one or more sites, and hope the perfect job comes calling – a passive job search; but really, when was the last time opportunity came knocking? 

A better option is the combination of passive and active search – you can setup ‘feeds’ on one or more job sites and then sit back while these job sites monitor their new content for jobs matching your criteria.  Then ‘bingo’ – all the great jobs come flowing into your email box or rss feed reader.  That’s the theory anyway. 

Does it work?  That’s the question for this week.  If you have a favorite job site for semi-active job search, let me know and I’ll cover it during the coming days.

Comments

[Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com]

Great suggestion, but some job boards call those feeds alerts or agents. The terminology may differ, but they pretty much all operate the same way. Rather than the candidate having to run the same search day-after-day, they run it once, save the search, and then the job board automatically emails them whenever a new, matching opportunity is posted.

These feeds a/k/a alerts a/k/a agents are tremendous time savers and eliminate just one of the many excuses that some candidates have for not networking. While job boards are great tools for finding a new position, they're just one tool and most people find new positions through networking.

Steven Rothberg, President and Founder
CollegeRecruiter.com career site
http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com

[Abhishek Goyal]

I feel the knowledge gap in job industry is so high that it needs some extremely good tool to make the information flow seemless. Although vertical search engines like indeed are pretty helpful, still it need a great matching engine to help to find something really good for yourself. I have never been able to knock some unknown opportunity just by unknown sources. It has always been through some folks you know. A combination of linkedin, brainbench, topcoder, portal(monster and craigslist) and usenet is what it takes to build a great place to make this information flow seemlessly and with enough reliability.

[Bob Wilson]

I agree, we still "... need a great matching engine". Part of the problem rests with the way we search ... we enter two words on average, and then we wonder why the search results are so poor.

At the same time, current search engines are optimized to work best with short strings, since this the way most people search. So, when users try adding four or five words, the search results are typically worse.

Still plenty of room for improvement!

Bob Wilson :-)