1. Strategy and Resume/Cover Letter Preparation
2. Finding Job Leads
3. Applying to Jobs
4. Interviewing
5. Negotiating the Offer
All of these are complicated, but one which does not get as much attention as some of the others is Number 2, Finding Job Leads. This should be done through a combination of research, networking, cold calling and online job searching. The latter is one of my firm's areas of expertise.
Job Search Words and Keywords
People are often wondering what words to use when searching for a job online. There are actually two categories of words which you need to identify:
1. Words to enter in the search engines on job boards (Search Words)
2. Words that reflect your qualifications or interest in a position (Keywords).
The focus of this article is to address the first category (Search Words). What words should you use to get the best results when searching a job board? At JobSerf, our employees conduct thousands of searches each week on hundreds of job boards so we have a unique interest in trying to optimize the time spent searching for the right jobs.
A job listing has both a summary and a detailed description. Most web sites allow you to review the summary listings and drill down into the details to determine suitability. There are usually three major components shown in the summary of a job listing:
1. Title - which can be a combination of Level (Manager, Director, etc.) of job and its Function (Marketing, Sales, Operations, Information Technology, Legal, etc.)
2. Company or possibly industry (e.g. Aerospace, Retail, Telecom)
3. Geography (usually an individual city and/or state, sometimes region)
Search Criteria
Sites will sometimes allow you to search through defined criteria (usually drop down menus which provide the user a defined set of values to choose from. Example: for geography, they would provide a drop down with D.C. and the 50 states). The most complex and ambiguous component is the Title, which also happens to be the most critical and complex for your job search.
Search Words
Most web sites use either defined search criteria or free form criteria which allows you to enter Search Words to return those job listings (summaries) which fit your criteria. The site will use that criterion to search for job titles or all text inside a job listing. It is important for you to type in the best criteria to make your searches the most relevant to retrieve your target jobs.
Get to the Jobs - Quickly
As a job seeker, your motto should be - "Get in, get everything and get out." Your goal is to see every job for which you are qualified as few times as possible and to get through each board as quickly as possible. Your productivity (jobs applied/time spent) is reduced when one of the following things occur:
- Miss Jobs - the search words are not broad enough, and therefore you miss an appropriate listing.
- Fodder - the search words are too broad, and return listings that are not of interest/appropriate.
- Repeats - in using multiple searches, you spend time seeing the same jobs numerous times.
Though mitigating these three are the basic principles of optimizing your job search, it should be noted that it is less risky to scan 50 job summaries to find the 10-20 appropriate ones than having 5 different targeted searches to try to being up the 'exact' ones that are a best fit.
Both ends of the spectrum (single broad search versus multiple targeted searches) are frustrating, but the broad search is the easiest to manage and will best avoid the chance of missing any appropriate jobs.
