Day 13 – Transition – Addendum

Matt is a friend who Boeing kick in the butt last year.  He has been at this longer than I have and has been invaluable in helping me along.  He has also read through this diatribe of ideas and regularly comments back to me.  Yesterday, he added to the Search conversation, so I thought, with his permission, that I would share some of his thoughts:

there's not a lot i can add to what i've already told you, but since
you asked ("I would love to hear what others are doing for searching, and what you have found to be helpful.")...

i have sent 5 applications from both SimplyHired and Indeed. this year. 1 and 3 respectively last year. careerbuilder is the winner both years by a huge margin. 47 total.

i use my own spreadsheet for tracking. just use sites to feed me
suggestions.  i have a "bucket" that i copy potential jobs into. in Firefox it's a bookmarks folder and i can drag and drop them into it. you could use a folder on your desktop or several other methods. find something that's quick, easy and works for you.

the "process" is to put things that look promising into that so you can go back to them later. then i don't feel like i have to get to the end of something, which allows me to not spend ALL my time searching. search-do something else-come back and really consider what I've dropped in there. also, if i look and there are 6 things in there, i know it isn't going to take as long as if there are 16. so i can plan that time better.

I tried careerbuilder today, it is a nice tool.  It excels after you get your list 20,000 jobs in the last 24 hours; it gives you some additional tools to quickly reduce that list.  It breaks down the list by: Category (Management, Sales, IT), company; city, and state.  This seemed to be powerful.  It has a nice advanced search interface that is easy to understand. 

There must be something about how you lose your job search engine virginity.  Simply Hired was my first, everything else is in relation to her.  These others are good, and I need to get better at looking at each of them in turn, but for me Simply Hired is still the one for me.

Love hearing thoughts on what I’m sharing (good and bad).  You can leave a comment on this site or send them to chrisabbey@comcast.net.