By SUSAN ADAMS
KENYA: The most important secret to making employment sites work for you: Use them sparingly. Too many job seekers spend all day hunkered over their keyboards, combing through listings, trying endless search filters and sending their résumés into black holes.
Rule No 1, say job coaches: Spend only 10 per cent of your time on job search sites. Here’s how to make that time count. Start with the Google-like job aggregators, Indeed and SimplyHired. Both list millions of jobs, drawing on company websites, job boards and newspapers. (At last count, SimplyHired had six million jobs listed in the US).
Both sites make it easy to narrow your search using refinements, or filters, that include title, company name and location. Indeed allows you to search within a specific salary range. SimplyHired lets you sort for “mom friendly,” “socially responsible,” and even “dog-friendly” workplaces. I tried looking for a dog-friendly job for a writer in New York City and I found only one listing, for a $14 (Sh1,200)-an-hour internship at the Nature Conservancy. San Francisco has four listings, all at a 3D software company called Autodesk.
Spend a little time playing with search commands. Both sites have “advanced search” options, though SimplyHired’s is tough to find; click the tiny wheel icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen. I prefer Indeed’s advanced search option to SimplyHired’s.
It’s simpler and more intuitive. Beyond locating listings for specific jobs, career coaches say job sites can provide a resource for key words and phrases that you can pull from job descriptions and include in your résumé, letters and e-mails. —Forbes
