A Quick Start Guide to your Job Search

Searching for a new job can be overwhelming and extremely time consuming. Most people will tell you that the best time to look for a job is when you have a job. That is true, but the reality is that most people do not find themselves looking for a job until they have to. They have been laid off, downsized, let go, terminated, fired...whatever you call it, having to look for a job unexpectedly can add great stress to an already stressful situation.



Before we get into the "mechanics" of mapping out a job search strategy, I would like to discuss a few tips to get your search off to a quick start.



Job Search Aggregators



An aggregator is a search engine that searches the internet, including all the major job boards and employer job postings on their web sites and gives you the results in one easy to read format. A good search engine can save you a lot of time. Instead of having to constantly check Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder and your local newspaper, a good aggregator will search these sites for you and combine the results into one easy to read listing. It should also filter out duplicate postings so you are not reading about the same job on different boards. If you Google "job search aggregators" you will find over 2 million hits for these search engines.



One that I like and have found to be very helpful is Indeed.com. Indeed is extremely useful because it lets you filter your search results by salary, title, company, location, job type, employer or recruiter posting and it will even show you your recent job searches. In addition, you can set up an alarm so when new job postings come online that match your search parameters, you can receive an email alerting you.



Other neat functions to Indeed.com are a "Salary" tab that gives you local and national salary trends to the jobs you are searching and a "Trend" tab that displays job trends in the industry that you are searching. An interesting feature is also their "Forums" tab. You can join discussions about specific company, job, city or general discussion. For example, I typed in "Baker Hughes" and found 27 results including the following discussions:



How to get a job at Baker Hughes.



I found a job!



What are typical Field Service Technician salaries?



Applying for Directional Drilling.



Baker Hughes Salaries, Bonuses and Benefits.



The Bottom Line



Make sure you post your resume to all the major job boards (HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Monster and Jobvertise) but save yourself a lot of time by "one stop shopping" and use Indeed to do your searching. If you have used Indeed or a similar search engine, I would like to hear about your results. Please post your comments.