Guerrilla Job Hunting

Job Hunting Case Study: Kevin Watson - Part 1 - "The Plan"

So my good friend Kevin Watson agreed yesterday to let me blog about him as we work together to land his next gig.  Kevin's done a lot in his career.  Much of it cutting edge.  None of it boring.  He's decidedly open to consulting opportunities because he does not want to move out of Ottawa. CANADA despite the 22 centimeters of snow which is now falling - adding to the 3 feet we're already enjoying.

As a headhunter, what do you do when you're best friend asks for help looking for a new job?

For me the toughest decision was whether to find him a job myself or show him how to do it.  Given I really admire Kevin, for a lot of reasons, I decided to take the hard decision and to slow down and show him.  {the old give a man a fish... argument}. 

“Discover How To Get The Job You Choose, At The Salary You Deserve -- Even In A Recession ...”

“As Featured by The New York Times,
CBS Radio, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and More”

Give Your Resume Sex Appeal

Flamenco dancers are sexy. So are languid summer nights and first dates with a new crush. But résumés? Not so much. If you want your résumé to get you to first base with a potential employer, it has to push the all the right buttons.  Read the complete article from Meridith Levinson on CIO.com

World's Best Honored at the "Recruiting Animal" Awards

Forget about the Grammy's the Emmy's and the Oscars - the Animal Awards are where it's at! While non of the award winners - save Mendoza who looks like Enrique - will be familiar to most citizens, this group is HOT HOT HOT!  Everyone who knows anyone looking for a job right now needs to point them to this web site: Recruiting Animal Awards

SEX tips for Job Hunters eBook

Because just being good at what you do is not enough.  Free to the first 1000 people who request it.   Register here, to get your free copy. 

 

How to job hunt with Facebook

Just as I was about to write a post on how to job hunt using Facebook along comes a great article and saves me the time.  You must read this article by Glen. Here it is in it's entirety.  As a job hunter you can use this approach to find the people you need to network with.

3rd party app searches Facebook better than Facebook

by Glenn Gutmacher

It seems dozens of new third-party Facebook applications are launched daily. But ones of direct value to sourcers / recruiting researchers are rare, so I eyed with curiosity the aptly-named Advanced Search (also at apps.facebook.com/advancedsearch). While the Google hack for LinkedIn profiles that Shally initially developed is very effective, there's nothing analogous that's great for Facebook -- it's been a much more closed site to search engines.

In some respects, the Advanced Search app is more valuable than Facebook's own Profile Search because the latter only displays people in your networks. If you like Facebook's Friend Finder then you need to try this.

This app spiders data off profiles, and if you add the application, it gives you a chance to fix values on the version of your profile that this app uses. As its Manchester, UK-based inventor, Chris Claydon, describes it:

    * Find facebook profiles for people who went to a particular school, college or university
    * Find facebook profiles for people who work (or used to work) at a company
    * Meet new people - Find people in your area by age/gender/relationship status
    * Find people by any location or network - not just your own
    * Find people even if you don't know their surname - narrow down the possibilities with age, location, etc.
    * Displays big profile pictures in search results so you can recognize people you know

He claims over 80 million people's facebook profiles, 100,000 schools, 500,000 place names and 300,000 different workplaces (growing daily) are included, so let's help this app become more popular and we sourcers can take particular advantage of it. Where I see the most value is:

   1. geographic searches (it lets you find people in locations outside the geographic network you belong to)

   2. employer searches: for example, let's say you do a normal Facebook search across All Networks for Oracle. That delivers the maximum 500 results, but they are random (many having nothing to do with the company). If you type Oracle in the company field in the "Search by company or school" section at the bottom of the aforementioned results page (don't selected the prompted company choice of Oracle or Oracle Communication), that's better, but again you hit the maximum 500 and it's still not obvious which Oracle these people are from. Instead, go click the "a Workplace" tab in the Advanced Search app and type Oracle. Now you get the number of people currently or previously at each of 15 different companies containing the word Oracle! Though the resulting profile only links to details if the person has added this app to their own profile (another reason to promote this app to your friends), at a minimum, you still can see the person's name, the "Add friend" link and "Send message" link.

   3. combine all criteria: The best part is you can combine the various types of searches into one (e.g., diversity criteria plus company name) like Facebook's own Profile Search but on a much larger scale. It's not exactly intuitive how to do this, so follow these steps: Start with your primary search criterion (click one of the tabs and search), then on the results page, click the "Find a date or new friend" link next to the appropriate result. For example, you could do the company-type search (e.g., type Microsoft), then next to the largest result (e.g., the one with over 1800 people), click the "Find a date or new friend" link. Now select Females for gender and MA for location. Ok, only a handful of results (and there are probably many more Massachusetts Microsoft women on Facebook), but you didn't need to be a member of the Microsoft network to run that kind of specific query!

The Groups search and Applications search are powered by a Google API, similar to what you can do with Custom Search Engine functionality so that's slightly disappointing, but it's convenient to have those searches here, also. Anything else? Advanced Search has a discussion board where you can ask questions, request additional functionality, etc., or you can ping the inventor directly about the app if you want to keep it private

Try out the app and comment below to tell me what you think of it, or any other great Facebook apps you've seen.o

The Wackiest Thing You've Done to Get a Job

From Meridith Levinson, Senior Online Editor, CIO.  These ideas will work for anyone in ANY industry.  Come on you know you want to CIO Magazine

Job Hunting? How to Make a Good First Impression

I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to comment on networking for job hunters.  What follows is 30 seconds of advice you better get right especially if you're trying to network in an industry that has had a lot of layoffs or downsizing [read New York AND investment banking].   Click the link above and add a comment to the posting.