Job Search Technology

About.com’s article, The Top Ten Job Search Engines on the Web, contains many of the names you’ve heard of: Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Indeed.com, HotJobs, Dice, LinkedIn and many more. The mega-job boards should absolutely be used as one of the tools in your job search toolbox. Another tool for your toolbox is Twitter. Twitter is rarely the first tool that pops to mind for job searching, however it has one advantage over all the other job sites.

Speed.
Twitter allows you know about jobs the second they are posted. Monster, CareerBuilder, and many company career sites send you notices when something is posted that “fits your profile”. They just don’t do it as fast and organically as Twitter. Searching on hash tags (“#jobs”) is a great way to find jobs that have been posted. According to CIO Magazine, “The Twitter tags most utilized by job seekers include #jobs, #job, #jobseeker, #career and #careers….” All you need to do is search by those hashtags (for example, “#jobs”) using Twitter’s Search Engine (or just go to Google).

You don’t need an account….
Even if you don’t have a Twitter account you can use their search features. There are also other tools that aggregate job “tweets”. The best tool I’ve seen is TwitJobs.com. It’s had over 911,000 jobs posted in the last 30 days. That’s an average of 1265 jobs per minute! Click on the nifty Job Map on the left side to see a map location of all the jobs tweeted in the last 72 hours.

Technology/Networking….
Technology like Twitter and job boards have really helped alleviate some of the burden of searching for a job. However, you need to realize that even the best technology is not going to give you the same (or better) results as direct interaction through networking. When you search, make sure you are using all of your tools in your job search toolbox - technical or otherwise.

Jay Markunas is a Career Coach and Job Search Technology Specialist. He and Partner, Angela Loeb, help job seekers and career changers position themselves to find their next job at The Job Search Boot Camp website.

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