Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [50]
Here are a few other sources:
• Career centers and job clubs
• College and university career placement centers
• Internet career sites
• Job fairs and career days
• Local and federal government personnel offices
• Yellow Pages
• Your area business journal (www.bizjournals.com)
■ STUFF THE CIA WOULD RATHER YOU DIDN’T KNOW
The length of this book does not allow me to do a detailed exposé on the really advanced means for unearthing information. A lot of cloak-and-dagger work goes on behind the scenes of many search assignments. Your quest to find your dream job is unlikely to require that kind of search. Explaining those advanced strategies and tools is beyond the scope of this book and would require 200 or 300 additional pages, but I won’t leave you hanging either.
The United States has 2 gurus on the application of competitive intelligence to recruiting and job hunting: Shally Steckerl and Dave Carpe. These 2 professionals are the absolute best when it comes to using the Internet. I highly recommend you visit their web sites if you want more information or a deeper understanding of how to use search engines and the Internet to maximize your job search.
Shally Steckerl’s site Job Machine has more than 100 screens full of tips and techniques for finding your way around. A “Google Cheat-Sheet” and a “Tool-Bag CD” are available on Shally’s site (JobMachine.net).
Dave Carpe’s site Passing Notes at www.passingnotes.com is a virtual cornucopia of tools and tricks that will take you deep into the world of competitive intelligence. Check out the article, “Confessions of a Call Girl ... or How to Give Good Phone.”
GUERRILLA INTELLIGENCE
Become an Easy Target
Jim Stroud
If I wanted to hire you, could I find you? If I looked on Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs, perhaps I could; but what if I did not look there, or on any other job board for that matter? Here is an ugly little truth that job seekers do not think about. When a company posts a job description on Monster or searches its database for resumes, it costs money. So, you know what happens? Large companies look for free resumes on the Web to save the money they would have spent on job boards, and smaller companies that do not have accounts with these job boards look on the Web to find free resumes. The bottom line is that if your resume is not online, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you search the Web for “free web hosting,” I dare say that you will find plenty of resources for posting your resume (or any other content) online for free.
To be sure, positioning your resume where all recruiters will have free access to it is imperative, yet that is only part of a winning strategy. Recruiters look for resumes using a series of specialized searches called “searchstrings.” Searchstrings are based on keywords that the recruiter thinks would be on your resume. For example, a recruiter looking for a programmer in Atlanta might visit Google and enter the following searchstring: intitle: resume programmer education atlanta | GA 678 | 770 | 404 -submit -apply ext:doc | ext:pdf.
To explain this searchstring, I am looking for documents formatted in Word or PDF that have “resume” as a title with the keywords “programmer” and “education” mentioned in the document. I am also looking for the words “Atlanta” or “GA” because that is the preferred location. Furthermore, I added area codes specific to the Atlanta area as well. Why? Candidates often list their phone numbers on their resumes. To see the results of this search, please visit: tinyurl.com/6b23h4 and you will be redirected to a Google search results page.
Now that you know how recruiters search the Web for resumes, why not make it easy for them to find you? I suggest that you create a resume profile page in lieu of a cover letter. What