If you’re entering the job market for the first time or haven’t searched for a new job in the last three years, you’re in for a shock over how the process works—and how it has changed in a relatively short period of time.
Job search 1.0 = help wanted ads in newspapers
Job search 2.0 = online job boards
Job search 3.0 = social talent communities
What’s next?
"Job search 4.0 will be less about finding talent and finding jobs and more about applying skills to the problems existing in any marketplace,” says Joel Capperella, vice president for Yoh, a Philadelphia-based technology staffing firm.
[See 10 Ways to Use Social Media in Your Job Search.]
To get up to speed, here are some new job search tools you should consider using:
1. ClearFit’s Career Finder: Figuring Out What Job Best Suits You
Career Finder by ClearFit, which is free for job seekers, differs from other personality and motivation surveys for a number of reasons. They use a “normative” survey, which compares people to people (for example, an average range of top performer attribute scores to an applicant’s attribute scores). In other words, you can validly and defensibly compare people with jobs to help predict performance.
2. MyWebCareer: Understanding How Employers Perceive Your Online Presence
MyWebCareer provides a free online service that evaluates your social and business networking profiles, your overall network, and your search engine footprint to generate a personalized Career Score. Your Career Score provides insight into how colleagues and employers perceive and evaluate your professional competencies and achievements. Your Career Score is refreshed each month, and you are notified of any changes and actions you should take.
[See The Most Effective Ways to Look for a Job.]
3. Vizibility: Creating an Accurate Google Search About You
More than 85 percent of executive recruiters report Googling candidates as part of the search process today, and almost half of executive recruiters have eliminated candidates based on what appears (or does not appear) about them online. Vizibility allows you to manage what people find about you in Google. You can create your own perfect search and choose a personalized URL to share with others. Additionally, personalized QR codes are now available for Vizibility SearchMe™ links, which can be added to résumés, presentations, business cards, and any other printed or online materials.
4. JobSTART101: Learning How to Find a Job
JobSTART101: Smart Tips and Real-World Training is a free online course for college students and recent graduates—but it’s a great tool for all job seekers—that introduces the professional skills necessary to succeed in the workplace. JobSTART101 addresses the gap between employers’ needs and workers’ skills by helping job seekers understand the real-life challenges and expectations of the workplace.
5. Gist: Bringing All Your Connections into One Location
Gist, a free web and mobile application, brings your contacts into one place to give you a full view of your network. Automatically get a dossier of the latest news, blog posts, and tweets for anyone in your professional network delivered where you want it, when you want it. Gist is available on the web, Gmail (Chrome and Firefox), Outlook, iPhone, Android, and inside Salesforce.com.
6. Glassdoor: Getting an Inside View of Companies
Glassdoor helps job seekers find and share detailed information about more than 110,000 companies, such as Facebook, Accenture, AT&T, Oracle, Starbucks, and UPS. This free, user-generated content includes salary data, company reviews, interview questions and reviews, office photos, and CEO approval ratings.
[See The Latest in Career Networking: Network Roulette.]
7. JobKatch: Organizing Your Job Search
JobKatch taps into your online and offline networking connections to help you identify the people you should contact to help you achieve your job-search goals. Free while in beta, JobKatch will help you organize all your job search information, including leads, companies, contacts, communication, and to-dos to help you find a new job as fast as possible.
8. Hello There: Standing Out Among Other Job Seekers
Hello There allows you to introduce yourself to prospective employers with personalized video pages. The first page is free to create and costs $2 per page after that (or $25 per month for unlimited pages). After you create a page, you’ll have a dashboard that tells you—in real-time—when the page is viewed and how many times.
9. RÉSUNATE: Applying for Jobs
RÉSUNATE is a new web app that matches experiences from an old resume (or LinkedIn profile) against job descriptions to automatically create perfectly tailored resumes. Basically, RÉSUNATE aims to be a universal way to apply to all companies. It’s free for your first 25 job applications with the opportunity to earn more by referring others to the service. This summer, RÉSUNATE will offer organizations free widgets to help better integrate their app with applicant tracking systems.
[For more career advice, visit U.S. News Careers, or find us on Facebook or Twitter.]
10. One-Page Proposal: Outlining How You Solve the Organization’s Problem
Once you have a killer resume, you might want to turn that into a One-Page Proposal. This web app walks you through step-by-step and transforms your resume into a proposal highlighting your idea for making money or increasing performance at a targeted company. The single sheet proposal can be handed over a cup of coffee or sent digitally via any technology—and down the road, from your social networks—making it deliverable anywhere. It costs $11.11 for three months of complete system usage (multiple proposal creation and storage).
11. StartWire: Escaping the Application “Black Hole”
StartWire, which came out of beta in late 2010, just announced its application update engine that allows job seekers to get daily updates on their job applications from thousands of employers. It is free, easy to set up, and works across all industries and job functions. A user simply shares some basic information about where they've applied and their application. After that, StartWire provides daily updates for all tracked applications and instantly notifies the user with an email or text message alert if their job status changes.
Which of these sites have you tried? What'd you think?
Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder & president of Come Recommended, a content marketing consultancy for organizations with products that target job seekers and employers. She is also the author of #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010) and writes career and recruiting advice for numerous outlets.
Corrected on 3/25/2011: A previous version of this article stated that RÉSUNATE charges a fee. The service is free.
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