Excellent Questions

Today I receive the following comment on the last post:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Getting ready for the first day at school":

How has your first week gone? Has it been easy to slip back into the routine, is it exciting to be there? How does it feel to work again instead of working at home to find a position? How is the adjustment of shared chores at home instead of you doing all the cooking and cleaning? Have friends been supportive?

Posted by Anonymous to Other Dribblings at February 18, 2011 7:46 AM

These are great and I thought I would answer them here.

How has your first week gone?

Getting ready for the first day at school

 

Tomorrow is the first Day at UW.  I’m excited to change from trying to sell myself, via my resume or my ability to answer questions, to actually doing what I know how to do—to what I have trained for years to do.

It is expensive to park, when you can find a place, and because of the traffic, it is hectic to get to where you want to go.  I will be taking bus 372  instead.  Monday, I did a test ride to check the timing: 10 minutes to get to the park-n-ride; 30 minutes on the bus;  and then a nice 10 minute walk across campus to get to my office building. 

Also in getting prepared, they ran a back ground check, (I passed ) and have been setting up my internet connections.  UW is using more cloud computing, so lots of resources are available via the web.  Some of these I’m merging with the services I already use like Gmail. 

In a few minutes will be laying out everything I need for tomorrow. And rechecking the timing in the morning.  I feeling like a first grader getting ready for that all important first trip to school.

I feel like I am starting a 6 month interview process.  I have 6 months to convince them that they are better off with me permanently on-board.  And at the same time, I will be evaluating whether UW is really the place I want to work.

Go Dawgs!!

D290 - Simply Hired—Useful again

Image via CrunchBase

On Feb 1st,  Simply Hired attempted to stream line it’s user interface and increase the prominence of sponsored jobs in search returns.  The result was the loss of the ability to sort job requisitions by date, which for myself and for many other job seekers made the site completely useless.

Many users pushed backed and many threatened to leave, (I’m sure many did leave).   Blog traffic here has increased since writing the entry title Simply Hired has become Simply Useless.  Much of the traffic was from Simply Hired employees. 

Well the listened.  After a couple days they announced that they would be making the change to reinstate date sorting.  And a couple days ago they made it happen.

So Simply Hired is back to being my number one job search engine.

And I would even say that it has improved a little.  There is better marking of search terms in the text of the returned requisitions.

Some people have complained about the sponsored requisitions that are returned.  These are job requisitions that have paid to have their jobs shown first.  When I was seeing these, they weren’t really useful, but I can understand them putting them first and getting advertising money from them.

I don’t see them because I an add-on called  AD Blocker Plus on my Firefox browser which cuts out advertisements, so this section isn’t shown.  I highly recommend this program.

Thanks to Simply Hired for listening to their users.

Related articles

• D283 - Simply Hire becomes Simply Useless (other-dribblings.blogspot.com)
• SimplyHired.com Gives JSYK Readers Top Job-Finding Tips (jsyk.com)
• Top 9 Job Sites to Bookmark for Your Career Search (mashable.com)

Day 285- Transition–Not Over but on Pause

The last few weeks have been flurry of activity in the job search.  I have mentioned before that it seemed like the job market changed dramatically awhile back.  It seems there has been more jobs advertised, leading to more applications , leading to more phone and personal interviews.  At the same time I have been increasing the amount of networking that I have been doing which also has caused an increase in activity.

Others have commented that they have experienced this same shift in their search, so it isn’t just constrained to this region or only to the types of jobs I’m looking for. There is no way of telling if this is just a blimp of employers trying to jump into activity at the beginning of the year and will die down here shortly. Or if this is a fundamental change in the job market, indicating that this long recession is finally starting to recover in ways that real people can feel.  

This activity has also led to a job for me.  Not the permanent position that I have been looking for, but there is some slight possibility that I will be able to turn this into a longer term position.  The job is temporary assignment for 6 months at UW, and then depending on how I perform and how the UW budget comes out for next year come out, which right now is not looking particularly rosy will combine to determine if more work will be involved.

D283 - Simply Hire becomes Simply Useless

Image via CrunchBase

My favorite job search engine has been Simply Hired for quite a while.  I have especially like the interface with LinkedIn and Facebook. 

I have 21 searches that I perform everyday.  I have these set up so in one click 1/2 of these searches are executed and come up in their own tab.  After I have gone through these and closed all the tabs, I execute and analyze the second half of the search results.

The searches are all set up to run the last seven days and sort in Date order so that the newest are at the beginning.  The one that are new that I have not seen are usually marked so I don’t have to go through all seven days worth.

Normally this would bring up about 500 jobs to look at, which I can quickly reduce down to between 10 to 30 jobs to read through and see if I want to apply.

Simply Hired changed their program on February first, and now there is no way to sort the output in date order.  This makes the results useless.  These 21 searches took between 15 and 30 minutes to go through each day.  Now instead of plowing through 500 possible jobs, I have to plow through all seven days, because they are in no particular order.   The first half took about 50 minutes to get through.

Unless this is changed, I will be changing to use Indeed, and can no longer recommend Simply Hired to be used for job searches. 

I’ve contacted the help forum on Simply Hired, but they claim this is a result of them improving their user interface , I’m afraid they are so removed from their users that this will take forever to resolve.  Unfortunately, I can’t wait for them, so I’m in the process of converting my searches to Indeed and hope to up and running in the next day or so.

Related articles

• Top 9 Job Sites to Bookmark for Your Career Search (mashable.com)

D282-Transition-Remaining Active in My Network

In an earlier post I started covering how I remain active in my network, and this second post will conclude this topic.  

My favorite networking tool in LinkedIn has to do with groups and adding to the dialogs taking place.  Best to listen to the conversation for a while and learn what is going on.  After feeling comfortable, bringing resources to the group, or adding to a discussion that is going on is a great way to network.  Over time you build up a relationship with the other members.  I find that I’m currently a member of too many groups, and it has spread me out a little more than I like.

It is hard to find a group that both relates both professionally and has a good dialog taking place in the group.  Some groups are all recruiters, some have no discussions, and some have discussions are of a tenor that I would rather not be involved in, but it is possible to find groups having a good dialog involving a good sized group of people.  Networking in this way if fun and there are some great people to learn from—some of the discussion are quite good.

I try to check in to LinkedIn several times per week.  And try to quickly scan the  the LinkedIn Status emails when they arrive.  I try to participate a couple time a week in groups and read the emails of discussions that I’m following or started.  I also pay attention to all comments on anything that I post, in order to learn from and better understand what people feel has value.