A Tutorial On How To Use Career And Job Search Engines

Career and job search engines are the way that most people today try to explore different types of work and to find a new job. Career search engines are helpful for exploring different occupations to choose which one(s) you want to pursue. Job search engines are useful for identifying hiring trends and specific job openings advertised by employers who plan to hire.

Here is a tutorial on how to use career and job search engines to identify job openings to pursue:

1. Start with these lists featuring top career and job search sites:

2. Now that you’ve spent time above just exploring the Web, get efficient by setting up a personal job search agent to do the hunting for you. My favorite site for doing this is Indeed.com. Personal agents can email you when job postings are published that match specific criteria that you tell it. You can search by job title, keywords in the job description, and/or geography. Try experimenting with different searches to discover which criteria cause you to receive the best job postings for your needs.

3. Next, use niche job search sites for your particular career focus. For example, for my field, psychology, if I use Google with the search term…

best job search sites psychology

…Google identifies SocialService.com and PsycCareers as two of the top niche sites to find jobs in psychology.

It is also a good idea to do a search using a term like…

psychology careers

A search term using “careers” rather than “jobs” may give you more general career info than job listings but it might also lead you to additional good niche job search sites suggested in the content giving more general career advice.

4. Set up a profile on LinkedIn and ask at least two colleagues to critique it for you. Then find at least three people who can give you excellent references on LinkedIn because recruiters tell me that they value more highly candidates who have at least three references on their profile. When you are creating your profile, make sure that you are clear in your career focus so that recruiters and hiring managers don’t have to guess what you can do and what you want. If you don’t know what you want to do, take a step back and figure it out before you try to launch a scattered job search campaign.

5. The major professional association for your career field is often a wonderful resource for job postings and career advice. For example, one of the best resources for trainers is the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The association for chemical engineers is AIChE. Often a professional association website will have a job listings section and these jobs will be highly targeted for a specific career field. There is usually a window of time when this is the only place these jobs will be advertised before the spider-type job search engines like Indeed.com find the job postings.

6. Spend about 10 hours per week online and spend the rest of your time connecting in person with as many people as possible. Some people mistakenly think that Internet technology has completely changed the way job search works but it has not done so. Human nature has not changed. If a hiring manager has 600 applications submitted online and a trusted colleague asks him/her to review the application of a specific person, the hiring manager will gladly do so and will likely hope that this person’s qualifications look excellent so that there will be a good reason not to carefully review all the other 600 applications!

Hope you find a fabulous new job or career!

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