How to Upgrade Your Career in a Recession Using Technology

Use the Internet, Web Services, and Social Networking to jumpstart your career in a sluggish economy. This tutorial accompanies the full article on VitaminCM.com. Stop by to see the entire article. http://www.VitaminCM.com

Video Transcription

Christopher Masiello: Hi, this is Chris from VitaminCM.com and today, we are going to talk about using technology as your advantage in this lousy economy. I am going to show you how to several web services and sites to make finding a new job easier. All these sites and services are going to require a resume. You can and should attach your word resume to any emails that you send, but you really need to enter your resume into the databases of these services. This can be a real hassle for most people, but I am going to show you how to take the pain out of the process with a few simple steps. The whole process starts with your resume. If you go to Google and type in create a better resume, you will find millions of sites that will help you create a really good resume. Once you have your resume created in Microsoft Word, you should Save the copy to your hard drive. Now I always save mine as first name last name.resume.doc. This helps a lot when you email it to somebody and they are looking through all these different resumes. They always know it is your resume because the name on the file is your name and then it says resume. So let's start with my word resume, I am going to double click to open it up and I need to make a text file out of this. I am going to use this for a lot of things but I need to create this into a text file. So I have open Notepad here which is a text editor and I am going to go back to my word resume. I will do Select All and then I will Copy it. I will switch back to Notepad and paste the resume in. So its pretty simple, there is a couple of quick clean up steps you want to take to make sure the formatting looks good but basically that's it. So once you have that created, you want to save this and you want to save it as a normal text file TXT and click Save. So if I go back to this folder now, you will see not only do I have my word resume, I also have my resume in a text file and here it is. We are going to use this in a minute when we start registering for these different services. Now that you have your text base resume ready, you are going to want to register at the major job search sites. So I am talking about Monster.com, Yahoo's Hot Jobs, Careerbuilder.com, Dice.com and Simplyhired.com. The registration process is pretty similar to all of them, so I am just going to show you one and you can repeat the process at the the other. So the first thing that you want to do is go to Post Resume and its going to ask you if you are already a member or if you are not a member. So I am going to say I am not member, so I will go to Continue and I want to put in my First Name, Last Name and I am just making this up and then there is couple of other things. So do you want these other offers and just say No. Now Resume Options. You have a couple different ones, Build my resume online, Upload my resume, Copy and Paste my resume or I will post it later. So I am going to go with Copy and Paste and you need to double check that you are agree to their terms. So I will say Create an account. Now remember, I have my text resume here so I am just going to copy it. So Resume Title, okay, you want it to be Public, Work Experience. So you can fill that out appropriately. Now your resume text, you can just paste it in. So I just took this straight from the clipboard and this is why I say you have this in a text file. There is a million different times that you are going to be asked for your resume and if you can you just drop it in there that saves you so much time. So the kind of jobs that you want, you can put different industries in, then you can select there off a couple. So, these are pretty standard jobs that should show me good results. Now Target locations, you want to go down and see we are looking today -- I am going to look in New York city, am I willing to relocate? I will say Yes. I am authorize to work in this country, willing to travel. Okay, so now Save Resume. A resume is in the system and I am registered. So now employers can search on that and anytime I see a job on this site, I can just say Send resume and it will instantly send that resume over. Once you get done, just go back and throughly fill out your profile. So any job experience, any skills that you have, anything like that and make sure you put it all in as much as possible because employers are searching on this too and that's your best shot at them finding you. Now that your resume is in, let's resist the urge to just run off and start applying to jobs because what we want to do is a couple of other things that will help make this go smoother. All of the big job search sites are great but I am going to show you my favorite job search site. Simplyhired pulls in job listings from many other sites, large and small, in addition to its own. Now this alone will save you tons of time searching for jobs but that's not the best feature. The best part about Simplyhired is that it leverages social networking to help your job search. So let's take a look. So I am logged into my Simplyhired account. So I will type in something simple like Insurance, New York city and click Search Jobs. So you will see a number of different jobs, you can see what sites they pull them from- Dice, efinancialcareers, TheLadders, so tons of different job site and you can look at them by title, by location, by company and you can look at all the different companies, and if you click the different companies, it shows how many jobs at each. Now here is the great part, I have this linked to my Linkedin account, where I have a number of different contacts and all my contacts have there information in there. So Linkedin those if they work at this company or that company. So if I click on for instance, Prudential Financial, it will show me jobs for there and if I click Prudential Financial on in, now its connected. So when I click on Prudential Financial on Linkedin again, it gives me a list of all these people that work at Prudential Financial that I know including myself. So what I could do is if I knew somebody who worked at one of these companies and I wanted information maybe about the company or about new projects they are working on or maybe they know the Hiring Manager. I could just connect to one of my contacts and say, hey do you know anybody over there at this at this company and can you help me out? So this is really good because the most important thing about finding a job is usually networking. It's who and what you know about the particular place. So this is really great. Another great thing you can do with your search results is have them email to you or in your RSS reader. So if I click View as RSS feed and say Add to Google Reader, you will see it will show a feed with all of my jobs. So if I click on this, I can start at looking at all the different jobs that matched my search. And you could just click on one and it will go right to the listing, click on it again and it will open the listing up and Simplyhired and you can just apply or look at it or whatever you would like. Now, you can use this method to have all the jobs that meet your criteria delivered directly to your inbox or to your feed reader. This helps a lot because you don't have to constantly keep searching, the search results are being delivered to you. One other thing that's really helpful when you are looking for new jobs is groups on Linkedin or Facebook or other social networking site. So if you look on Linkedin for Groups Directory, it shows all of them and then I can go by category, so Alumni Group, Corporate Group, Conference group. So let's say I went to Corporate Group, search, it will pull up all different types of Corporate Groups. So if I belong to one maybe that's from a company, I can do that, I can look at one from an industry, so a professional group. So maybe join networking groups inside of my industry and that's another way to find people or connect with people who work in your industry but at different companies. Facebook has something pretty similar too, so if I search in groups, I can say All Networks, Specific networks. There is tons of different groups there. You can look through, you could search, let's say you wanted an Accounting group. So there is tons of different accounting groups you could join. If you are an account, you can meet other people in the accounting industry maybe they work at a company you would like to work for and these are the really great sites at helping you find the hidden job market, maybe a job opening that isn't even available yet but if somebody at another company knows they need a person and they are about to get authorize the post or position, if it somebody you know, they might say hey do you know any accountants and say they could come to you. So this is something that will work great for whatever industry you are in, I would highly recommend joining the profession groups on Linkedin or on Facebook.