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Welcome back, and congratulations to you for clicking play on this video! You had to see the length on this thing and you must have been thinking, “What in the heck is this guy going to be talking about for like 45 minutes?” Well I’ll tell you, if you watch this all the way through, I’m going to take your job search to a whole new level. I’m going to show you some things in this video that will drastically speed up your job search.
Ever get a call from a headhunter and have no idea how they could have gotten your name? I’m going to show you how they found your name. Headhunters have to be able to find people that no one else can find. We have jobs that very few people know about. They are certainly out there, anybody can find them, you just have to know where to look. You need to know where to find the keys to open the right doors, and which search strings will unlock which websites, and in this one video I’m going to show you how to find more jobs than you ever knew were there.
I debated whether to put this video under the Search tab or the Prepare tab because I will be showing you a bunch of specific strategies for finding hidden jobs, but I ultimately chose the Prepare tab because the emphasis needs to be on setting up a routine, and setting up your technology to be working for you. So yes, I’ll show you the strategies here, but you need to the legwork along the way so these strategies can be repeated frequently, and in some cases, set up to work for you without you having to do them again and again.
Now there is an ocean of information out there on how to search for jobs online, so we’re just going to wade into the water here, starting very basic, talking briefly about computers and what you need, just getting our feet wet there. Then getting a little bit deeper maybe up to our knees talking about email strategies, still seems pretty basic. I’m going to show you some life changing tricks there that will help you use email to actually speed up your job search rather than slow it down, at least these were life changing tricks for me when I first learned them. Then we’ll go even deeper, maybe neck deep as we talk about some job board strategies, and once we start talking about the job board aggregators, you’re going to be swimming in that ocean, and I know that job board aggregators aren’t a big secret, but when I show you how to really use them to find jobs you never knew were there, you’re going to swear you saw a mermaid swimming under you in that ocean, and that’s just the beginning. From there I’m going to show you some very advanced search engine strategies. I’ll show you some tools you can set up for free to be bringing jobs to you from pages that don’t offer email alerts, or have any kind of update alert systems on them. I’ll show you how useful user groups and forums can be and where to find them, and finally I’ll even touch on personal webpages where you can plant your own resume, but frankly I’m not going to spend a lot of time there because I just don’t think that’s necessary. It CAN be helpful, yes, but if you’ve never built a website before it can take a ton of time to do, and I’m not here to show you how to extend your job search, I’m here show you how to land faster. By the time I’m done showing you around this ocean, you’re going to using a shark as a surfboard and telling him to take you back to shore.
And we’re not even going to talk about social media here. Yes, this video will take your job search to a whole new level by itself, but using social media effectively…that’s the next floor up from this one. I’ve actually got 2 different videos on social media, one under this Prepare tab and another under the Search tab. You don’t want miss those.
As I do with just about all these videos, I’ll close with some resources and an assignment for you to get started. If you look directly below this video and all of our videos, you’ll see a timeline of subjects, so after you’ve gone through the whole video once then you can refer back to the sections you want to re-watch and just skip right to them. But I’m telling you, you need to watch this all the way through first. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about a specific subject, email for example, watch it anyway so you can ask yourself, “How good am I at this?” because everybody can get better at anything. Challenge yourself.
I’ll tell you, this video is just going to give you just a taste of what this whole program, SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com, is all about and just how much you can learn as a member of SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com.
Now I told you we were going to wade into the water and start basic. Here we are, feet in the water. You really need to have regular access to a computer, and when you’re using your computer, don’t have your feet in water, not a good idea. This is just an analogy so I’m actually going to let that analogy go here. Forget about the ocean thing! Okay, now maybe it seems obvious, if you’re watching this you have access to a computer, but maybe you’re watching this on your phone or a friend’s computer, you need consistent access. If you don’t have a computer and need one, I have a few places listed below this video where you can get a decent one for just a few hundred bucks. You really only need to have a computer that gives you internet access and that has Microsoft Word on it because that’s what most Applicant Tracking Systems can read; they have a hard time with PDF resumes or other non-Word formats. Personally I recommend having Outlook as well for your email, but that’s certainly not necessary. There are lots of free email resources out there like Gmail from Google, which I would also recommend. If you can’t afford a computer right now, no problem. Like we talked about in the last section, check your local library and look to see if your State has a job search facility available. Those places have work stations with computers and internet access. You don’t even need to buy a flash drive or get a Dropbox account because if you have a free email account, like Gmail, you can just send your resume to yourself as an attachment, and then it will always be right there for you in your inbox AND sent file.
I’m going to give you a lot of good information here, some good tools you can use to speed up your search, and I know there will be several times when you’re nodding along and thinking “That’s a great idea, I’m definitely going to start doing that!” but then you definitely never do. Remember, these tools won’t work if you don’t use them. If you go to the hardware store and buy a saw, the board won’t break into two pieces just because you own the saw; you have to use the saw. Same thing here. If you want to find a job fast, you have to put this stuff into practice right away. It’s time to get to work.
For the email script, please see the blog article: 4 Email Tips to Speed Up Your Job Search
It’s time to talk about job boards and how to make them work for you. First, a Job Board if you’re not familiar with the term, is essentially a place where you can go to see a big list of jobs. Sites like Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Dice.com and SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com, although that’s a very different kind of a list. Most job boards are resources where employers can pay a significant amount of money to advertise their jobs. To post their jobs these companies are paying up to $200 and $300 per post! I’ve heard some people say when they are looking at different recruiting firms that, “Well that company only has 5 openings right now, or 10 openings, they must not be doing very well.” Keep in mind, it’s not necessarily about how many jobs they actually have open right now, it’s how many they want to afford to post on THAT job board. The reason I say SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com is a little different is because as we all know, companies don’t always advertise their jobs. If they’re really urgent positions, a lot of times they give those jobs to recruiters first because recruiters will fill them faster. Well when recruiters start calling people about their jobs, they need to have them online so the candidates they call about them have a reference point. Well I’m a part of a private network of recruiters who are working together to locate the best people for our clients. We have over 1,000 jobs posted on our Job Board at any given time from across the Country and they are all jobs from recruiting firms. NONE of those jobs are more than 90 days old, not one of them. But for these particular spots you’ll need to move quickly because these jobs will fill quickly. Not only is the recruiting firm who has been given the job working hard to fill that job, but it’s in the network, so there are multiple recruiting firms working hard to fill that job. So you have to move fast, and it would be to your advantage to take a different approach to have more success, and I have a quick blog on this site with some thoughts written out on how to do that (there’s a link here on this page to that blog). What I love about these jobs though is that they are for people who need to find a job fast, and that’s what this site is all about. But even though it’s a little different than most, it’s still a Job Board.
So your best strategy for searching Job Boards when you need to find a job quickly, is to start with a very specific search, then widen to get more results. I know you’re probably used to doing it the other way around, starting with a broad search and then narrowing down if there are too many results to go through, but that takes a lot more time. If you start with a specific search, like say you work in Accounting, but your specialty is accounts payable and you’re used to working on the Lawson systems, put all of those keywords in there in your first search. If there’s a job available right now that matches your exact needs, you need to find it right now and apply before any more people apply for it. If you start broad, then narrow down, and narrow down, and narrow down, it could be 5:00pm before you send your information to that perfect job, and by then they could have 20 other applicants and decide to stop looking at resumes until they interview those other 20 people.
One thing I’ve learned in recruiting (and remember, I make my living by finding good people for jobs, and sending their resumes to my clients to start the hiring process) is that if I wait, I could miss. I can’t tell you the number of times early on in my career I would find a really good candidate at 8:30 in the morning, but I didn’t want to stop making calls because I was in the flow of things. Then around noon, after I found a few people and I’m getting ready to send those resumes over to the client, wouldn’t you know it, I get an email from the client saying, “Thanks for your time on this position, but I think we have enough resumes in the mix at this point to start interviewing. Please don’t send any more resumes.” UGH!!! Then I have to call them and try to convince them they need to see more people. Maybe I’ll get 1 more person over there, but I can’t send them all 3. Unfortunately the other 2 are out of luck…because I decided to wait. So the moral of the story here is to find the best jobs quickly and apply right away. If you do a specific search and nothing comes up, then take 1 keyword out. Is it more important that you work in accounts payable or on Lawson products? Take the one that’s less important out, search again. You should get more results, apply to those. Then take another keyword out, search again, and so on.
When you’re done with all the searches on all the boards, you can feel good that you’ve done what you can today from the job boards to find a job quickly. But wow, that took a lot to time to run all those searches! Frankly, you can’t afford the time it takes to be doing that every single day on every single job board if you’re going to do everything else I outline in this program. So another key element that most boards have in common is an alert system, I’ll show you a couple of examples here.
There is a screencast here so please watch this portion instead of reading. I walk you through what they look like and how to set them up.
Then there’s the job board aggregators such as Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. I know many people have their opinions about which one is better, and I do too. Personally for the searches I run, SimplyHired.com has been getting better results for me recently, but I also really like the Trends information from Indeed, so you need to search both. If you’re not familiar with these sites, essentially these are search engines, like Google or Bing for example, but they just search job boards and career sites. On a periodic basis, they’re systems crawl the internet looking for job postings, and they repost them on their site. The downside here is that they don’t get through every site every day. So sometimes you’ll see positions up there today that opened weeks ago, and if the job closes, they don’t always come down off the site. So it’s not a perfect system by any means, but there are still 2 really great reasons why you want to regularly use these sites.
First is because of the alert systems. Just like the boards, these have alerts and you can have them sent to you daily. That’s very nice. With Indeed.com just scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see “get email updates for the latest…whatever it is you’re searching for”, put in your email and you’re done. In SimplyHired.com, you’ll see in the top left a note that says “email jobs like this to me” and a place to put your email in. Set it up, and it works great on its own.
And the second reason is in the results list they will publish WHERE they found the jobs. This is where you can expand the list of places you are looking for jobs! You’ll find job boards for your industry that you’ve never heard of. Realistically, new ones are popping up every month, how would you know that? How can you find out what they are? What user groups and forums are out there for your specialty? Look through all the sources of these jobs and you’ll increase the numbers of jobs you can find and apply to this week.
Under the Resources tab of this site you’ll find a list of different job boards and job search resources for you to look through. Please check that out, pick the ones that make the most sense for you and your search, bookmark them, and then work them into your daily plan; which we’ll talk more about in the Planning Your Day section.
Let’s talk about searching online, good old fashion Google searches. There’s more to this than you might think. Almost everybody knows how to search for something on Google, you just type in what you’re looking for and you get a nice list, right? Well, there are some strategies that elite users know about to cut through all the clutter and find results that nobody else is finding. It’s kind of like driving, just about everybody knows how to drive, right? But if you were a taxi cab driver and you drove for a living, you’d probably know about some roads that very few other people knew about so you could do your job a little better. Well as a headhunter, my job is to find good people and to find good jobs, quickly. So I use search engines like Google a little differently than the rest of the traffic that’s cruising the internet, and I want to show you a few of my tricks here.
All web pages have similar elements to them. They have titles, they have URLs (which just means, the website address), and they have file types. The great thing about these search engines is that you can search those specific elements. For example, if I needed a SharePoint Developer in Chicago, which is a very specific technical position, I would write a search string that looked like this:
(intitle:resume | inurl:resume) “sharepoint developer” (Illinois or IL) (312 | 773) (-job -jobs -apply -submit -benefits)
If I really wanted to get specific I would add a string of file types like these:
(filetype:pdf | filetype:doc | filetype:rtf | filetype:htm | filetype:html )
I know that looks really complicated, but it’s not. I’m not a programmer, I just learned how to write faster search strings, that’s all, and I’ll show you how to do it right now. So let’s look at this example. When I search “intitle” that means that the word I write directly after the colon, without spaces, must be in the title of that page. The title of the page is just what they named the page, and it will almost always show up in the tab of the page. For example, if you look up at the top of this page, in the browser tab, you’ll see “Technology Tips”, that’s the title of this page. When you see the vertical line, called a pipe, that just means “or”. This is what they call a boolean search string, which uses lots of ANDs and ORs. So the opening statement there, I’m saying if the word “resume” is in the title of the page, or in the URL (again, that’s the website address, and many people will have a personal page, first name last name.com, and store their resumes on their site with a forward slash “resume”), so if the word resume is in either place, I want to see that page.
But wait, I also want that page to have the words “sharepoint developer” together, in that order, somewhere on the page, which is why I have them in quotes. And they need to be in Illinois, so I put Illinois or IL in parenthesis, and I did use the word “or” there so you can see that you can actually use the word, or you can use the little pipe like I did earlier. And I can even specify to have a Chicago area code on their resume if I wanted. Any words you see there with a minus sign in front of them, those are words that I don’t want to see on the page. So if a page result comes up that has the word “apply” or “submit” or “benefits” on it, that’s probably going to be a job, not a resume, so I don’t want to see it and it won’t show up in my results.
Why am I sharing this example…you’re looking for a job, not a resume, right? I get that. The reason I’m sharing this with you is in case YOU have your resume online, you can pay closer attention to how you have it labeled, and what words are on your resume so you can be found faster.
So let’s talk about finding jobs. I could spend many hours talking about different search strings, so if you need more than I end up sharing here, just do some Google searching for articles about search strings and you’ll have more than you need. I’m not here to teach you how to do an advanced Google search, I’m here to show you how to find a job faster, and right now, we’re using this tool to do it.
The advantage search strings give you to finding jobs faster, is you can locate hidden jobs with them. What are hidden jobs? They’re simply jobs that are not posted in the normal places you’re already looking to find them. There are TONS of them out there. I’ll share just a couple resources for you here.
First, many companies and a majority of recruiting firms, use what’s called an Applicant Tracking System, also called an ATS. These systems track and store all their candidates, as well as their jobs. Personally, for my recruiting firm I use a product called Broadbean, which posts my jobs directly from my ATS out to multiple locations for me simultaneously. With a few clicks, my jobs are on Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com, in my LinkedIn groups, on my company Facebook page, and lots of other places. Broadbean stores these jobs on a site called aplitrak.com. I’m not the only firm who uses Broadbean, there’s lots and lots of jobs there. So if you just did a search like this one on the screen now. site:aplitrak.com intitle:“sharepoint developer” and (Illinois | IL)
site:aplitrak.com – which just says to search only through this site followed by intitle:“sharepoint developer” – which says I only want pages with these words together in this order and (Illinois | IL) which says it needs to be in Illinois
You’ll get a great list of positions posted by all the firms who use Broadbean technology.
The way you find these types of boards is getting back to what we talked about in the last section on aggregators where I said to watch for who is hosting the jobs that are posted. To take that one step further, click on the jobs. For example, I’ll do a search here on SharePoint Developer in Indeed.com. I have a bunch of results here, and before I was just looking for sites that looked like job boards or relevant websites, but here’s one from a company called Rightpoint. I have no idea what that is and it doesn’t look like a job board or a relevant page, so normally I would just pass this by, BUT, when I click on their ad, I look at the URL here at the top and I see hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs followed by a bunch of stuff. So let’s do a site search on that and see what happens. So I put in site: hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs “sharepoint developer” and here you’ll see a nice long list of jobs you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Here’s one more little trick to find hidden jobs, again having to do with the Applicant Tracking Systems. Since a great number of recruiting firms don’t host their own jobs, they use an ATS, because when they put the position up live in their own ATS it also goes directly to their company’s website without having to re-enter all the information in a second location. So let’s look at this example. Here’s a recruiting firm called DriveStaff, and if you’re not familiar with them this is probably the greatest technology recruiting firm in the history of Chicago, and I’m not just saying that because that’s my company. Okay, well maybe I am just saying it because of that, but still, it’s a good company, you should check us out. Anyway, here’s our jobs page. You’ll notice the URL says drivestaff.com/jobs, and if I run a search here, that doesn’t change, and even when I click on a job, that doesn’t change. But let’s try something here just for fun. I’ll go back to my search, and instead of clicking on a job I’m interested in, I’ll right click with my mouse, then open in a new window. NOW look at the URL; notice it doesn’t say drivestaff anywhere in there. It says pcrecruiter.net/pcrbin and a bunch of stuff, PC Recruiter is the name of my ATS! So let’s grab the website address and the first folder, which is just the first word after the slash, we don’t need the rest of this stuff here because that’s specific to this search on the screen now, we just want to find the folder that PC Recruiter houses all of their jobs for all of their clients, not just DriveStaff, even though DriveStaff is a really great firm. Sorry, I can’t help myself. Now lets go to Google and do another site search. So we’ll put in here site:pcrecruiter.net/pcrbin and we’ll just put in SharePoint and see what happens. And wouldn’t you know it, here’s a huge list of jobs that you weren’t finding anywhere else, and the same search string rules can apply here. Add in a location or a State, be specific about the job title, try to get a very targeted list of jobs that make sense for you to apply to.
Get creative with this, spend a little bit of time on it to learn the process, but don’t lose your whole day doing it. I’ll work this into your daily schedule in the Planning section so you do spend some time on it each day, but I’ll keep you on track so you get the rest of your daily to-do list, done. Searching online to find a good job quickly doesn’t have to be intimidating, you can do this. Lets’ dig into some user groups, where to find them and what to do with them.
If you’re not familiar with that a user group is, I think you’d be amazed at just how many there are out there. Virtually every job type has one, not just technology positions. You can find users groups for Accountants, Waitresses, you name it, and I’ll bet it’s there. A user group is essentially an online meeting place for people who do what you do, and wouldn’t it be nice to know some other people with your background who are also looking for jobs? They might have some insights into job search strategies that you could benefit from. Even better, they could know of some job leads for you to pursue in your area. Even better still, recruiters and Hiring Managers are looking in these user groups for people who do what you do to fill their jobs, and if you’re a member, you must be passionate about that subject and you’re probably someone they would want to hire! So join the group to give yourself a decided advantage.
How do you find them you ask? Well, this is why I put this section AFTER the search string section, because you’ll need to use some of the concepts there. To find a user group, and we’ll continue with our SharePoint example, I’ll go to Google and
I’ll write this in the box:
sharepoint (“user group” | ug)
Many places will abbreviate user group as just ug, so definitely include that. What you’ll find is a bunch of groups local to different areas. To find one in your area, add a local city to your string. So I would write:
sharepoint (“user group” | ug) Chicago
And now you’ll see I have a long list of local SharePoint groups. Jump in and start building relationships in there.
Forums can be used for the same purpose. These are designated discussion areas for people to talk about whatever subject they want. So to find forums, just search forum:sharepoint and you’ll find a bunch of forums.
To find related groups in LinkedIn.com, it would be faster to just search through the groups within their internal search engine to find related groups.
The idea behind all of these are to find people who would know how to help you, and build relationships with them. You’ll be surprised at just how many new leads will surface from that. This is very doable, give it a try.
One more alert system I need to tell you about quickly is called WatchThatPage.com. This is a classic, but it’s still one of my favorites. If you’re in the habit of routinely going out to specific company websites to look at their career pages and you do this day after day, this system is worth taking a look at.
This is free, and it will monitor any static webpages that you regularly visit for you. A static webpage is a page where the information is just listed there, it’s not a results page that comes up after you run a search. For example, if you went to a career page and they just had all 7 of their open positions listed there, and the only way to change whats listed there is for them to rewrite the page, that’s a static page. Which is different than a dynamic page which a page where they would ask you what type of job you’re looking for by keyword, what location, and any other questions to help you narrow down your search, then you click a search button and it brings up a list of results, much like the job board here on SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com. That’s a dynamic page, and this won’t work for those.
But for the static pages, if you set up a free account in WatchThatPage you can bookmark the career pages you want to watch, and if they ever make a change to that page, WatchThatPage.com will send you an email letting you know exactly what they changed! You’ll get an email saying DriveStaff.com added a Java Developer today, and if you’re a Java Developer, you can call them first!
For the dynamic pages, here’s where I would recommend going back to Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com, and run a company specific search which is just done by writing company:drivestaff (if that was the company you wanted to follow). You’ll get a list of jobs they have, or even if they don’t have any jobs at the moment, if it’s a company you want to work for, set up an alert so you are notified of any new positions on a daily basis. That’s a great tool, give it a try.
I promised I would touch on building websites for your resume, so I’ll do that quickly right now. Web hosting is very cheap, I have a reliable host I do recommend below, it’s who I use and it’s about $6 per month at the time of this recording. You can install WordPress or Joomla to build the site quickly and easily yourself, and that’s free. Aside from making the site look professional, which means keeping it clean of any profanity, raunchy pictures, or anything else you wouldn’t want a future boss to see (which by the way, I just scratched the surface here on internet searches, if a savvy employer wants to see what’s on your Facebook page or Instagram page, they can and will find it! Keep that stuff clean!), aside from all that, the most important element to your site need to be about keywords. You need to be searchable and use keywords that people are looking for.
You can go about this a couple different ways. First you can set up an account on Google AdWords to do some searches on what people want, but that can get a little tricky. Personally I use a product called Market Samurai, which makes it a ton easier to figure out what people are looking for, how often they search it, and a ton more. That’s not free, but if you use the link below you can get a discount if you buy it. Personally I use it and love it, but I’m not trying to push you to buy anything here, just telling you what I use. If you’re going to build a website for your resume, make sure people can find it.
Below this video I have some links where you can find a computer at a good price. Just like last time, I did some looking around for the best prices, and I listed the top 2 or 3 at the time of this recording. I’m not going to mention them by name here because I’m going to keep monitoring those and I’ll update if I find better prices, and I don’t want to keep re-recording this video to mention the best ones at the time. If you know of a better option, please let me know so I can share it here with everyone else.
I’m also going to include links here that will take you to different places on the resources page where you can see a list of job boards to check out, and any webpages that I’ve recommended.
Last but not least, I’ll have links below and on the resources page for any relevant books I think you would be interested. I only post books that I’ve read myself and find useful. And whenever I can I’ll include a link to my detailed review of the book, AND whenever possible I’ll include an interview with the author of the book so you can get a feel for that person and what to expect from the book. I was fortunate to host a radio show for many years called Job Talk, and I’ve interviewed many of these authors, including Richard Bolles, who wrote the book I’m recommending below called Job-Hunting Online that he wrote with his son, Mark Bolles. If the name Richard Bolles sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the same guy who wrote the best selling book, What Color is Your Parachute?” This book below is very relevant to this video section and has tons of great information in it.
Again, some of these are affiliate links, which means if you use these to buy any of the products the SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com will get a commission for that and you’ll be supporting this site and helping us keep this content free for people who need it, which I certainly appreciate, and it’s the same price whether you use the links or not. Thanks in advance for using those links.
Here’s your assignment for this video section. I know there was a lot of information here, but when you break it down step by step, it’s really not that bad.
First, make sure you have access to a computer that you can get to anytime you need to, and make sure it has access to Microsoft Word.
Next, start by getting your email prepared. Set up your new email addresses, organize your inbox, or DEorganize your inbox I guess I should say, set up some templates in your signatures and learn how to use the delay delivery feature. And if you have an interest in using Boxcar, download the app and set it up.
Then go do some searches on the various job boards and set up your alerts, and then to the same in the job board aggregators in both Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Be sure you’re looking for who is hosting the jobs, and you’re looking for job boards, relevant sites, AND for potential job posting software sites like aplitrak and jobvite.
After that, start playing with the advanced Google searches. Once you know how to write those strings, you’ll find that they work in a lot more places than just Google. They work in LinkedIn, in Craigslist, and all sorts of different job sites to help you sort through the jobs faster. By the way, one thing I didn’t mention about those searches in Google is that you can actually set up alerts from Google to be sent to you! Just do a quick search for Google Alerts, it will ask you for your search criteria and you can set up the alert. Make your internet searches come to you, instead of having to run them yourself every day.
Once you know how to search, start looking for user groups and forums and pick your favorites. This is something you don’t need to do over and over again, join the ones you like best and just stay focused on those.
Then you can get started on the next video section which is about choosing the right social media tools.
Remember, finding a good job quickly doesn’t have to complicated, you can do this. Now get online, it’s time to get to work.
