I’m preparing for a presentation on virtual job search and career management tools.  These might include specific job boards, other other sites.  I have some ideas on what some great online tools are (the image on the right **is** subliminal messaging ;), but I’d like to hear from YOU what you think is GREAT, and what is ROTTEN. 

This survey is just one page, where you put in two greats and, if you want, two rottens.  Now’s the time to praise or vent… please click here (or click on the monkey below) and let me know which online tools you love and which you loathe!

Thanks!

This post is brought to you by Valerie Pendergrass, Greatness Guru and founder of The Next Step Coaching & Consulting.  Valerie understands that greatness is borne of honoring an authentic self and bringing ones inner gifts to the surface. She works primarily with those in career crisis and/or at a career crossroads and specializes in aligning inner being with external objectives.  Valerie supports her clients to Aim high, Achieve High and Not Settle because life is too short to just have a j.o.b.  Valerie is a JibberJobber Career Expert Partner.

I regularly get the opportunity to meet amazingly cool people online through forums, Yahoo Groups, or JibberJobber.  I came across Nancy Babyak about a year ago and have been very impressed with her analytical talents as well as her kindness, insight, creativity, etc.  She is one of the great people you could ever meet online, and I’m uber-excited to get to meet her next month in Seattle!  Without further ado, here’s Nancy’s take on job search tools she uses right now (no mention of JibberJobber, but she is an active user, fan and JibberJobber evangelist):

As a PMO Manager and IT consultant, I consider myself to be in a constant state of job search.  Either for my own career, or to keep up with job posting trends.  I find that it is much easier to hire a .Net consultant with extensive Oracle back end experience when you know how agencies are posting jobs.

I am always looking to improve my Job Board workflow of e-mail alerts, recruiter repositories, and salary databasi (some of them really do seem to be written in Latin!).  Here are several of the sites that I use and some of the challenges I have come across.

Test Search

When I conduct a search for my next position, I find it challenging to pick the right keywords – “Program Management Office,” SDLC, Governance, and Change Management.  All can give very broad results ranging from high-rise construction to technical customer service.  For the job search statistics below I used the simple acronym PMO in each tool for a US national search to try and find as few results as possible… which isn’t always easy.  Here is the technology I use to look for job postings:

The Ladders.com

82 matches, mostly Program Manager listings, all relevant jobs on the first 2 pages were also in the Indeed listing as being on Monster or Dice.

TechCareers

7,209 matches, 48th match on the list had PMO in the title, and had been posted the day before.  I had already found the posting 12 days earlier through TheLadders.

Indeed.com

6,473 matches, 300 deep and all had the phrase in the title with more than half on the first 3 pages being personally relevant without having to re-search.  Very few analyst listing in the mix, but lots of project managers that serve as part of a PMO – a fine line that entering a more exact search could have weeded out.

Jobirn.com

None.  Only 690 in the tool so far.

RiteSite.com

44 matches, 3 exclusive to the site and the rest from popular search engines.  All relevant and none posted on other sites.

Aside from the actual results, here are my thoughts about each of these job search tools:

The Ladders

Limited workflow tracking allows you to monitor where you are in the hiring process and set reminders to follow up with recruiters.  Personally, I am not a fan of the small note text box provided and found it easier to store communications outside the system. (note from Jason: JibberJobber! JibberJobber! JibberJobber!)

Recruiter profiles are available – high level overview of company, open posts, recent job openings, and the ability to send your resume directly.

I found the resume feature is misleading… while it may have some scrape technology to assist in job suggestions it is also the only interface for recruiter contact so a full, pretty word version matters more.  I posted a ‘scannable’ version first and confused several recruiters that I contacted.

There is a Recruiter search – but only 6 sector designations so pretty broad brush.  I limited my sights on ‘Pacific’ region, ‘technology’ sector, ‘technology’ function – gave 917 results but there is a chance to view the matching jobs directly… which yielded 857 jobs.  Great if you want to know what kinds of jobs a recruiter handles.

TechCareers (part of the Beyond.com family)

I find this a great resource to compliment the posts found on Dice.com for research more than my own career search.

Provides for a very extensive profile with the free membership, but the business rules around what is required or included have not left me with warm and fuzzy feelings:

• desired salary range is one of the required fields
• No access to profile metrics
• No recruiter interaction

Provides for an extensive list of optional Q&A that you can add to even the basic profile.  Some of the questions include:

• “Tell me how you would handle multiple projects in the job.”
• “Why have you held so many jobs in recent times?”
• “Tell me one of your pet peeves?”
• “Everyone has a favorite class in college. What was yours?”

Indeed.com

One of the new kids on the block, this is truly a Search Engine’s search engine for Job seeking. No posting of resumes, no networking, no charge.  The interface is Google-like with very clean options.  It is the first alert of the day that I check and the first place that I go with a new keyword I want to test.  All the traditional sites (Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder…) are there, but so are many, many, many corporate and niche boards as well.

Are you unsure of the keywords that you are using? Swing by the ‘Job Trends’ feature to see what percentage of the “50 million jobs a year” used those words.  Using the single entry of “PMO” with no location, the following graph is displayed:

 
Hyperlinks lead to a search result page for that combination of keywords with a great sidebar of options to refine further – salary estimate, title, company, location, job type, or employer / recruiter.

RiteSite.com

I have used the resume blast feature several times.  I like the ability to send a cover letter with the resume as either inline or as an attachment to recruiters.  Messages use your personal e-mail address so there is no need to go back to the site to track responses.  For a US national search earlier this year, 391 messages sent, no e-mails returned, 38 asked that I go to their website and enter my info myself, 2 asked for phone screens that day, and 1 resulted in an in person interview for a Director’s position.

If you prefer to create your own blast, you can access Dun & Bradstreet’s database.  After that, formulate your query, find out the count of the results, and download the results once free.  With additional queries, company count and cost are shown before you have to purchase.

Not only can a job seeker search the job listing, but you can conceal your personal identity on resumes.  Within the networking module, you can reach out to these future ‘partners’ through the RiteSite message center or traditional e-mail.  Many people have all of their prior companies concealed and as someone who is not industry specific I have not found a way to work this feature into my workflow.

The text of John Lucht “Rite of Passage” book, with evolving content, is available in the RiteSite University module and makes for a good starting place if you are diving into the world of job searching again.

Jobirn.com

New age technology meets the job search. Determine your favorite companies, view the profiles of hiring managers and recruiters, or surf job listings.  See something you like?  Use the chat client to interact with the poster in real time or leave them a message. VMWare has a huge presence, but not many others… I like the interface and try to remember to stop by often since there is no e-mail alert option.

BlueSteps.com

THE place to be seen if you are open to $100k opportunities… or so they say.  Seekers cannot search.  Post your profile and wait to be contacted by one of the members of the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

One time lifetime membership fee with the option to purchase yearly upgrades to search recruiter list and participate in moderated forums.

I have been contacted more from recruiters looking for architects or infrastructure people and hoping that I know someone that would be interested than direct postings that I would be interested in.

The career toolkit has some interesting articles and links to reference books on a variety of career transition and search topics.

Execunet

I think of this as my father’s job board.  Expanded features include F2F meetings - CEO breakfasts, Roundtables, and others available in most major US cities.  Listings heavy on CxO and VP positions, but some engineering listings are starting to appear.  Membership also includes a bi-weekly newsletter, printed on paper, and delivered to your house. I let my membership lapse so I can’t provide a gauge as to result relevance, but I found that RiteSite and TheLadders covered the landscape enough that I let this one go.

Nancy Babyak, PMP shares her passion for technology and process through her netweaving adventures across the web exploring how we all take turns being buyer, seller, helper and helped.  As an independent executive consultant Nancy helps business leaders and IT executives grow through evolutionary process improvement and long term strategy alignment by constructing innovative Program Management Office (PMO) structures.  Nancy helps explain the tools of the PMO through her PMO Training Wheels Blog and carries those principles through to the home through her Work Life Balance Blog.

What do you use, love, and opine (opine: one of my favorite words from legal counsel :p) 

I was asked a few weeks back how to get your picture to show up next to your comment on this blog.  For example, if you look at yesterday’s post, you’ll see pictures for Karen Swim and myself, but no one else. 

Doing this once will impact not just this blog, but other blogs also.  When I commented on a TechCrunch post, I saw my picture come up automatically. 

All you do is go to Gravatar.com (that is: globally recognized avatars), set up an account, put in your picture (this will be the one that shows up everywhere), and you are good to go!

It’s that simple, and will be recognized on blogs that tap into Gravatar.  The logic behind this is based on the e-mail address you use for your Gravatar account, AND the e-mail address you use when you leave a comment… if they are the same, your image should show up.  If you want to comment anonymously, don’t put your e-mail address.

Need more info on Gravatar?  Check out this info from their blog, linking to a Chris Pirillo screencast.

Cool, eh? Head on over, put your picture up and then leave a comment, so I (we) can see what you look like

Jim Stroud is a thought-leader in the recruiting/sourcing space, and recently did a presentation on “how to find a job when the economy sucks.”  I just checked out the three blog posts he did to document his presentation and found some cool ideas that I hadn’t heard of, or thought about before.  It figures, he’s the though leader in this space!

Do yourself a favor and check out these three short posts.  Jim certainly expanded my vision, especially regarding what a job seeker should do with technology in a job hunt:

• How to Find a Job (when the economy sucks) Part 1 of 3
• How to Find a Job (when the economy sucks) Part 2 of 3
• How to Find a Job (when the economy sucks) Part 3 of 3

Let me know what you think!  One thing to consider as you read this, Jim Stroud teaches recruiters and sourcers how to find the right candidates.  His techniques are very heavy on technology (search engines, job boards, etc.), so his perspective helps a job seeker optimize his/her chance of being found by a recruiter who uses technology to find candidates.

After almost two years and 19 Personal Branding winners of the month, it’s time to shift the emphasis a little.

I started this personal branding award for two reasons.  First, it was to recognize those who are showing, or growing, their personal brand through current technologies.  Most of the recipients are (or were) bloggers.  A handful only had static websites.  A few of them extend beyond their own blog or website, and I recognize that in the post I wrote about them (see bottom of this post for the list).

The second reason I started this personal branding award was to show YOU that YOU can do this too!  It’s not just for the elite, or the early adopters of blogging or other technologies.  The strategy of developing and portraying your personal brand is a strategy that you should seriously consider.

June’s winner is one of my favorite people.  I “met” Heather Gardner on the My LinkedIn PowerForum a number of months ago.  I found her to be brash (in a good way), passionate, and anxious to help people.

So how am I shifting emphasis?  I’m not going to talk about her blog.  And I don’t think she has a static website.  Even so, she is doing an excellent job sharing her brand all over the place.  I can sum it up in one word… Heather is:

Of course, she’s married with kids, but she is very engaged in discussions online.  She is active enough in various places that many people know who she is, what she does, and what value she brings. It’s not her full-time job, so she can’t do it 8 hours a day.  Nonetheless, she’s out there.  Here are some things she’s involved in:

My LinkedIn Power Forum - Heather is quick to share, ask, give advice, participate and encourage.  Many people have benefited from her involvement there, and I’m sure she has branded herself as a very helpful, knowledgeable and resourceful recruiter (and employment expert).

Recruiting Blogs Ning network for recruiters - Very active here, sharing with and learning from her peers.  When I created my I Just Got Fired slideshow done she asked if I was going to put it on RecruitingBlogs.com, which is something I hadn’t thought of.  It showed me that it is on her mind, and she’s involved there, and guess what… there are over 9,000 recruiters on that little social network!  Powerful, and a great place to be involved.

Twitter - some think Twitter is bunk, and others like it when it isn’t down (which is too often).  Nonetheless, it’s an amazing place to develop relationships, learn about other people, and share “who you are” with your followers.  Of course, Heather is there, active, with hundreds of people following her.

LinkedIn - of course she’s on LinkedIn.  She’s not just there - she is engaged.  She has asked three questions and answered 12. How many have you asked or answered??

Blog - Yep, she has a blog, too.  I find her style and perspective to be quite insightful and engaging.  And with titles like Honey does this blog make my “BUT” look big? and “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” Promiscuous Web 2.0, how could you not be interested?

She’s elsewhere, like Facebook.  I’m sure she’ll be other places, too.  But the point of this post, and the reason I’m recognizing her, is because it’s the next natural step to what I’ve recognized over the last almost two years of this personal branding award: being engaged.

Heather is definitely engaged.  And the relationships she’s building will benefit her for many years to come.

Heather Gardner, congratulations! You join a special group of professionals and have earned a coveted link from my monthly winner’s blogroll area (on the left), six months of premium JibberJobber (you can transfer/award this to someone else ), and a cyber-high five! And, a new addition to the prize list is the two hour (!!) minute recording of Blog Marketing 201 - 501 (part of the CEO Training for Me, Inc. - listed at $49.95 (but much more valuable than that!).

Feel free to post the You Get It award on your site!

Here are the past winners:

• September 2006 - ClickDave - my review
• October 2006 - Kent Blumberg - my review
• November 2006 - Heather Henricks - my review
• December 2006 - Adelino de Almeida - my review
• January 2007 - Rob Humphrey - my review
• January 2007 - Ariel Meadow Stallings - my review
• February 2007 - Mike Schaffner - my review
• March 2007 - Susan Johnston - my review
• April 2007 - Thomas Clifford - my review
• May 2007 - Rob Frankel - my review
• June 2007 - Trent Hamm - my review
• July 2007 - Katie Konrath - my review
• August 2007 - Robb Hecht - my review
• September 2007 - OOPS! I took this month off and didn’t realize it! Lucky me
• October 2007 - Tanya Ferrill - my review
• November 2007 - Sean O’Donnovan - my review
• December 2007 - Andy Shaindlin - my review
• January 2008 - Kate Herrick - my review
• February 2008 - John Halamka - my review
• March 2008 - another OOPS!
• April 2008 - another OOPS!
• May 2008 - Morty Schiller - my review

In March I read a post by Lucian Beebe, Director of Product Management, called Get Your Inside Connections with BusinessWeek & SimplyHired. I was simply jealous at the very cool interface that BusinessWeek offered to their readers, and immediately sent an e-mail to the address at the bottom of the post asking how we could do the same thing.

Thankfully, we got a quick reply and were able to give this functionality to YOU. How cool is that? A huge THANKS to LinkedIn (and the LinkedIn API) to help make your experience richer! Here’s how it works:

First, you get real data when you are actually logged into LinkedIn … so go login to LinkedIn! If you don’t login to LinkedIn, you’ll be prompted to, like in this picture:

Next, log into JibberJobber and go to the Company List Panel. This You can get there by clicking Companies on the main menu (or, in the image below, click on the link in the QuickView Stats for your Target Companies).

Next, on the right side of the List Panel you’ll see all the icons. You should see the little “in” icon (if you don’t, click Manage Columns and add that icon). Simply click the in icon and you’ll see a popup of who you know at that company, like this (these are the contacts that I have that have eBay in their profile… based on my connection relationship with them… so your results will look different):

Finally, you can drill down to any of the options they show… which goes to LinkedIn’s page, and shows as search results.

Again, thank you LinkedIn for opening up and allowing this type of functionality - it really does make the web a richer place!

Last night I got the umteenth e-mail asking me what I think about Naymz.

Naymz is a site that I have recommended, based on a friend’s recommendation, as a tool to help you claim more of your online profile.

Theoretically it is a site that helps your name come up on a Google search … at least, that’s the way I understood it.

I finally signed up for Naymz to check it out. I was discouraged by two things:

1. Of course, like social networking sites, they wanted me to invite all of my contacts to the network. The problem with this, in my opinion, is that if I do this, I’m strongly endorsing Naymz to my contacts, which I’m not in a position to do yet. Plus, I might recommend it to a few people, but I don’t want to do a blanket endorsement to all of my contacts (some of whom I have a strong (or weak) relationship with).
2. Just by filling out my profile I get points. Want another five points? Put what country you are in (but don’t put USA - they don’t like abbreviations)! Want another five points? Put what city you are in! Hold on… I want privacy (well, you know what I mean :p)… this idea of getting points is a yellow flag for my skeptical side.

My understanding is you get more points, which makes you more credible (ie, the more points you have, the more real/genuine/trustworthy/??? you are… ??).

Instead of discouraging anyone from using this, I’ll throw it right back at you - what do you know about Naymz? Is this something that has helped you, or that you recommend? How or why?

If you are interested in reading more about Naymz, here’s some buzz in the blogosphere:

• Liquid HR writes Naymz.com business model and context
• Favorite Online Resources writes Naymz Reputation Network
• Technology Evangelist writes A Stalker Enabled Social Network (note, his argument applies to LinkedIn, too. Read the comments on that post to figure out how to “resolve” it, if you are concerned (I’m not))
• Web 2.0 Weblog writes What The Hell Is This Naymz Thing?

The last few weeks we’ve spent quite a bit of time on my re-branding… I hope to wrap this up and bring a message back to you.

It’s no secret that I’m big on personal branding. I love personal branding. Why? Because with a strong, or appropriate, personal brand you can create pull-marketing, rather than push-marketing.

When I was in my job search I was a nobody. I was cliche, a commodity, a dime-a-dozen. No one had heard of me, and I was a perceived expert in … nothing.

I knew that I had expertise, and could bring value to the equation, but nobody knew that, nor did they know me. My job search was a lot of push-marketing, and it was painful.

The power of a personal brand changes all of that. Create your personal brand, be on-brand, let your brand permeate your market, and you’ll see pull-marketing. People will call you and want to get to know you better. Your job search will be completely different (be aware, this doesn’t happen overnight!).

In my JibberJobber re-branding exercise I’ve been amazed at the feedback. Not only have the votes and comments been powerful, I’ve received a lot of advice outside of the Survey Monkey poll (hey, one more day to vote - go do it now!).

How would YOU do the same thing for YOUR brand? A lot of times, in order to figure out what our brand is or could or should be it’s helpful to understand how we are perceived. This has been huge for me, and it could be huge for you.

It’s actually quite easy. There’s a company called Reach Communications Consulting, which helps professionals like you develop and execute your own personal branding strategy. One of the tools they offer is a 360 Personal Branding Assessment. For less than $30 you sign up and get started. The idea is many of your professional contacts get a survey about YOU, and they anonymously enter their thoughts on who you are… helping you understand how you are perceived.

Maybe you think you are a hotshot, CEO-type that excels in strategic planning and motivating the worker-bees.

And then you get your Reach 360 feedback and learn that most people think you are more reserved, very logical and detail oriented - perhaps you are better suited for a Project Management role right now.

Just knowing that empowers you to make a better decision for your career path, or can encourage you to get better training and mentoring to become that motivating CEO.

There’s power in knowing how you are perceived. If this is interesting to you, I encourage you to check out the Reach 360 program. Again, it’s less than $30. If you need help there are over 200 certified personal branding strategists in 21 countries who can help you. My JibberJobber partners who are certified can be found on my career expert partner page. The partners who are sponsoring this contest who are also Reach Personal Branding Strategists are:

• Deb Dib
• Walter Akana
• Megan Fitzgerald

If you do it, let me know how it goes! I think it’s a great investment!

Many of you may not know that I’m on Twitter. I’ve been there for quite some time. And I tweet regularly. Here’s my latest tweet:

I haven’t posted about it here for the same reason I don’t post my LinkedIn profile: I am not fishing for followers (in Twitter), connections (in LinkedIn), or friends (in Facebook).

Not that I don’t want you to follow me, I would love for you to follow me Especially if you are on Twitter (or those other networks). Interestingly enough, I share some things on Twitter that I would not share on this blog. It’s such a different platform, with such a different purpose, that it seems appropriate.

The funny thing is, I used to feel like I was cheating on you, my loyal blog reader, when I announced something on Twitter before I announced it on this blog :p How silly is that.

But I’m finally ready - if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at http://www.twitter.com/jasonalba. You can click on that link to see what I tweet about. You may be surprised to find more silly, personal stuff there. That’s just the nature of Twitter.

Have I found business value out of Twitter? Absolutely.

Have I found people enhancing their personal brand on Twitter? Without a doubt.

Is Twitter for everyone? No way.

But it’s good for me. One more question…

Will there be a “I’m on Twitter — Now What???” book? I’m not saying

Today I’m announce a new, special part of the JibberJobber offerings. I’m a firm believer in You, Inc. and the care that we all need to take with our own career management. You are the CEO of You, Inc. and I want to help with your training and continuing education.

Over the last two years I’ve learned a lot. None of it has really come easy, but I tell people “you can do a lot with fourteen hour days!” Whether you are busy with a job search, your family or your job, you probably don’t have the luxury of spending as much time as I have learning things the hard way.

I’m now ready to share certain topics with you - topics that I’ve been sharing in webinars with various associations and organizations. These webinars are meant to help you cut through the fluff and walk away with knowledge and tools.

Each of the webinars will be $49.95 per person (or $24.95 per person, if you have a one-year-or-more premium upgrade). You can get more details on this page. Here is the schedule of webinar presentations through June:

Blog Marketing 201 - 501

February 14 1pm MST
February 26 6pm MST

Hands on LinkedIn

March 6 1pm MST
March 18 6pm MST

Write your Book!

April 3 1pm MST
April 21 6pm MST

Hands on Facebook

May 8 1pm MST
May 20 6pm MST

LinkedIn for Companies

June 5 1pm MST
June 17 6pm MST

For detailed information, or to sign up for a webinar, click here. If you have any questions please let me know.