Uber Job Hunting

As I promised in my first post I’m going to tell you how I have made my job searches smarter and simpler, freeing time up to do other things such as learning new skills.

Before I get to the end solution, first let me outline my original job search technique, and the problems I was facing each day.

Firstly I was using a very standard job search procedure using 4 of the main job boards in the UK (Jobserve, Jobsite, CWJobs, and Reed). There are plenty of others out there, but these are the ones that I prefer to use. Secondly, I was logging onto each job site separately and performing a search for my chosen role, skills and location. Then, for each site I like to perform several searches to cover particular towns and cities within a given radius of each.

Problems

Below are the main problems I encountered.

1. No central view
   It is very difficult to keep track of new jobs and duplicates across many job boards simultaneously.
2. Slow reaction to fresh job adverts
   In order to react before everyone else you would have to search every site every 5-10 minutes!.
3. No common alerting mechanism
   Each job board has a different way to alert. Only one of my job sites provides instant email alert functionality, all others perform daily digest of jobs from previous 24 hours.
   Way too slow!
4. Time consuming
   I spend most of my time glued to the job sites performing searches, when I could have been learning
5. Lack of consistent search criteria
   Each job site requires different search criteria and logic for include and exclude terms.
   

It is very stressful to run a successful job hunt this way. You find yourself spending most of your time in front of the computer, constantly plugging away at each job board, looking at a job advert, then losing track of where you were up to. I just had to find another way!

Looking around on the web for a couple of days, I found some partial solutions to some of these problems, but nothing really ticked all of the boxes. The first solution I came up with was to use Google Reader as an RSS news feed aggregator. If you’re unfamiliar with RSS or RSS aggregators I suggest you take a quick look on the web to learn what they are. Although RSS translates as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, in my simple mind it is just a standardized way to deliver and receive information such as news or blog posts.

My Google Reader solution involved creating custom RSS feeds for each job board corresponding to the search criteria I required. I’ve been looking for both IT contract and IT permanent work, and in two different cities, so I have 4 RSS feeds per job site to allow me not only to aggregate these into a single view, but to narrow my view from within the Google Reader application. The result is something like this:

Searching for jobs with Google Reader

Timing is critcal

The problem I found with Google Reader is that whilst I had solved my first problem of not having a central view of my jobs, and I had also reduced some of the time and effort required to perform my search, Google was taking a very long time to refresh my job searches. In the background Google seems to decide alone how often to update each RSS feed, and in most cases I found it was returning all of the latest jobs for one job board in a big lump and all with the same time-stamp. However, after clicking on one or two of the jobs I found that the jobs were actually posted at vastly different times, sometimes hours prior the time given by Google. Although this was less than ideal, I had gained the ability to use the Google Search interface to search my jobs and filter them further - a very nice feature of Google Reader.

So I tried using this method for about a week, as it had vastly reduced the complexity of job searching. However because of the way a job site would literally dump all of its new jobs at once, the time-stamp issue became a much larger problem. Jobs from other job boards were literally pushed down out of the Google Reader view. In some respects this actually made things worse than manually using each job site separately.

I finally abandoned Google Reader and decided to look for an alternative. I spent a long time looking for something that would check the job boards more frequently than Google, and would arrange the jobs in chronological order. Trying things such as RSS feed readers or gadgets for the Vista sidebar, I found that these all had their own quirks.

An Uber tool for Uber job hunting

Eventually I discovered a wonderful tool that is quite new on the RSS feed reader scene, and this became the key component of my Uber Job Hunting technique.

The application is called Notify.Me. This application (or tool?) is an RSS feed reader with a difference. Not only does it check my RSS feeds on a very regular basis (every few seconds), it also has the option of downloading an application that will literally “notify me” if a new job has been posted. If that wasn’t good news, notify.me can also send SMS text messages notifications to your mobile phone (if your network is supported). Best of all, notify.me is completely FREE!

notify.me illustration

With notify.me now monitoring my job feeds, all I have to do is be in front of the computer (or have a supported mobile network for SMS) and I’ll receive a pop-up every time a job that matches my search criteria is posted.

notify.me application

Out of the trash and first in the queue

To give you an idea of the power of this application, I saw a fabulous job opportunity pop up within 2 seconds of it being posted on a job site. I clicked on the link which took me to the job advert ‘apply’ page, and I was able to apply with my CV and standard cover letter. Within moments the recruitment agent telephoned me. The agent was very surprised to find that I had seen and applied for the job so quickly, and she hadn’t received any other application at that point.

My application was submitted for this role, and I was 1st in the queue!

Well the bad news was that I didn’t get the job :) but until that point I hadn’t been successful in being forwarded for a single job as my CV hadn’t even made it to the ‘review pile’. As I’ve said before, many jobs at the moment will receive sometimes hundreds of applications. A recruitment agent will not be able to process all of them, so they may only open the flood gates for a short time until they receive say 20-30 CVs; anything later just goes into the trash! However, no longer do I have to go in the trash! Using this Uber job monitoring technique I can be 1st or 2nd in line time and time again.

Looking at my list of job search problems earlier in this post, you’ll see that I’ve actually overcome the first 4 of my problems using this technique. Not perfect, but 4 out of 5 isn’t bad at all!

I hope find this post useful, and I’d love to hear any questions or suggestions you may have for Uber job hunting.

Finally I want to say that I’m not selling my own services, or notify.me. Notify.me is a free tool, as is all of the advice on my blog.