Searching for a Job Online
In nowadays world, using social media to explore new job possibilities is a must. Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, there are tools that help you to get, or find rather, a new job. In case you’re geeky, you can also benefit from social media as most web pages offer subscriptions by RSS or Email.
LinkedIn, XING, Freelancer
These are easy. Go to a page like LinkedIn or XING. Search for something someone might be looking for. You get the difference? Rather than looking for official job titles, search for words someone could use as a job description. This way you open your search to a wider audience.
In my case I could be searching for “screencast” or “screencaster”, but I suspect not as many people are looking for that, as opposed to “tutorial”, “video ad”, etc.
Other pages like Freelancer.com even allow to save searches as RSS feed. This way you can deal with new job offerings while reading news.
Let’s get more advanced. I explained Twitter’s Search exhaustively in the Twitter Screencast I (which you might want to watch at this point)
These searches can either be saved to your Twitter Profile or, again, be subscribed to using RSS. I search for people who search for screencasters. The search therefore is:
screencaster looking OR need OR searching OR want
You see that the search is a bit more specific than the one for, e.g. Freelancer.com. This is because I expect people using Twitter to be more precise what they are looking for. Again I’m trying to facilitate a search that resembles a message someone could write on Twitter.
Actually this setup can be extended even further. You could use ifttt to send you an email or use Boxcar instead. There’s a slew of options available.
Google has an Alerts feature. These are basically periodic searches, which, once performed, can send you an email or again are available as RSS feed.
Conclusion
Be smart when searching for a new job these days. Especially in the tech business I would highly recommend using all the tools that are available to you. Make it easy and always mind the person looking for you.