Because I am a fan of doing anything that can save you time and energy while still conducting an effective job search, I recommend setting up personal search agents at my favorite job search site, Indeed.com. The tutorial below shows you how to do this.
First, think of specific skills you have that are in demand by employers. For example, if you know a language like Spanish, let’s see what jobs are available that require ability to speak and/or write using Spanish. To make the example more specific, let’s say that you want to live in Houston and you would love to work in the oil & gas industry.
Go to Indeed.com.
Click “Sign In” and then either “Create an account free” or enter your sign in information if you already have an account.
After you are signed in, you will see the main Indeed.com search page.
Enter your keywords: oil & gas Spanish
On the day I tried this, I discovered these Houston oil & gas company jobs that require or prefer Spanish language skills:
– Inside Sales Specialist at National Oilwell Varco
– Sales Executive for Belcip, Inc.
– Customer Relationship Coordinator for “Major International Oil & Gas Firm”
– Help Desk / Technical Support Representative for Oil & Gas Industry
– Translator, Oil & Gas Industry
Now suppose you look at the above jobs and none of them seem like a fit with the skill you realize you most want to use: training.
Go back and edit the keywords to: oil & gas training Spanish
Scrolling through the results, you would find that no training positions are currently requiring Spanish language skills in the oil & gas industry, so the search can be broadened by deleting the keyword Spanish, making it: oil & gas training
The search results include:
– Training Specialist, ConocoPhillips
– Training Instructor, Cameron
– Supply Chain Application Support Trainer, SBM Offshore Group
– Training Coordinator, AkerSolutions
– Training VTA Specialist, BP
– Technician Training Coordinator, GE Energy
By reviewing the search results, you can evaluate how well your qualifications fit with the advertised positions and you can decide which ones to pursue.
Before logging out of Indeed.com, you can click on the link, “Get new jobs for this search by email,” which will mean that you won’t have to come back every day to run this search but can choose how often these search results will be delivered to your email inbox. The default value is “Daily” and I recommend keeping it there, but you can edit it to “Weekly” if you choose.
Now that you have freed up the time and energy it would take to manually run these searches yourself, my advice is to make online job search a secondary priority and connecting with people in your targeted career field a top priority. Research shows that people are more likely to land jobs via acquaintances rather than via online job search, so please don’t spend all your job search time online. Also participate in professional associations (both face-to-face and via social media), attend conferences as either a speaker (best) or attendee, blog or publish articles about your expertise, and establish yourself as someone that recruiters and hiring managers want to meet.
By using both online and face-to-face methods of job search, you maximize the chances of landing a new job sooner rather than later.
Hope this helps!