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Be a Sexy Job Seeker and Increase your Odds of Getting the Perfect Job

Matt Baril — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:51:25 +0000

All my life, I've been extremely lucky in my job hunts and career opportunities. Unfortunately, I have many friends who are not so lucky and are currently looking for a job, it actually seems like most of my friends are looking for jobs in the Vancouver area right now. Luck, determination and hard work have been the main factors of my career opportunities, but I think everybody works hard and is determined, but there are ways to put odds on your side and increase your luck. I thought I would share resources and tricks that have helped me and some of my friends to put odds on our side.

1. Be resourceful. There are some really nice tools out there that can keep you on top of things really easily without much effort. Use them! The first thing you need is a good way to know about the relevant jobs available in your area, and in 2010 there are 3 websites you cannot leave without for job hunting:

These 3 websites are what we call aggregators (read this post to understand why you should love them) and a search will fetch and provide you with results from many different websites. If you're looking for tech jobs in Vancouver for example, they will go on many job boards in Vancouver and do a search based on the keywords and the area you entered. That means you don't have to do and redo all these searches on all these website everyday. You can also save your searches and subscribe to the RSS feed, so you don't even have to go back on the website at all, the job postings are just delivered to your RSS feed reader. If you don't have an RSS feed reader, I would recommend Google Reader. You can even make the RSS feeds to be emailed to you on a regular basis with free services such as feedmyinbox. For instance, you could get up in the morning, open up your email client and apply on all the relevant jobs posted within the last 24 hours while having your breakfast. Cool eh?

If you're more into technology, you can use Yahoo! Pipes. That's like the Lamborghini of all the tools you can possibly have. It lets you make your own feed instead of using on of the web sites mentioned above. You can aggregate your own feeds, search, filter, sort, etc. That’s the tool I use for my job posting on this blog which displays the 150 most recent tech jobs in Vancouver in real-time. Yahoo! Pipes is free.

2. 2. Use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is just the most awesome social networking tool for jobs. I know many people who complain about it, but I think they just don't know how to use it. I've had 3 job offers since January through LinkedIn. Jobs I did not ask for, the companies came forward and offered me a job or an interview. There are also a lot of jobs available on LinkedIn (you can find them through simplyhired.ca as well) and now you can follow companies (brand new of a few days). So if you're interested by one company you can follow them, and when they open a position or when someone leaves, you can apply on the job even before the company advertises for the job. Having a complete profile on LinkedIn also adds credibility to your application, especially if you can get a few recommendations. Anyways, my point is that LinkedIn is just great! If you decide to join, add me: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/mattbaril.

3. 3. Own and use your dot com. This might be pushing it a bit, but having a website helps as well. My website is a blog and there is quite a bit of content, which means that potential employers can surf through it and read bits and pieces to see my English proficiency, my capacity to write, think and how disciplined I am to keep the blog up-to-date. It helps in two ways: an employer can find you through your blog, but it can also add credibility to your application. In my interview at Elastic Path, a company I worked for during the Olympics, the HR person kept talking about my blog and she asked me only one interview question, the rest of the 45 minutes were spent talking about my blog which she pulled up on her screen. But, a personal blog is a lot of work and I know people who have used their website differently and have had some success as well. I went to school with this guy called Cody Watson and I like what he has done with his dot com. It's pretty simple, it takes few hours to put together, but it looks really professional and helps for the first impression.

4. 4. Always apply on all jobs, even those you’re not too fond of. This is probably the most important mistake people make, not applying on all kind of jobs. Don’t be picky, you don’t have a job for god sake, just apply on everything you think is related to your area even though it’s not the dream job. There are many reasons to do so:

You can practice your interview skills and will not have the pressure you would usually have if you really wanted the job.
You will have feedback on your resume and the experience you have that is most appreciated by employers. If you don’t get the job you can even ask why and know where you’re falling short.
And most importantly, you’re much sexier when you have a job. People are people and hiring someone who doesn’t have a job seems like a risk. If that person was that great he or she would have a job right? Right… so get a job to make yourself more attractive. It also shows you are motivated, ambitious and driven. Once you have a job, you can say things such as: “I love working for company ABC, they have provided me with XYZ kind of experience and treat their employees very well. However, I feel that with my background and experience I could add more value and be more useful to a company like yours by doing ABC. As you can see from my resume I have already worked on projects similar in scope and have had great success.” Well now you are lot sexier than by saying: “I’ve been spending the last 2 months looking for a job, but couldn’t find the right fit.”

5. 5. Spend 8 hours a day looking for jobs. Finding a full time job is a full time job. You should set targets for yourself such as sending 10 resumes a day. Once you have the right tools set up for you, you can easily get 100 jobs per day into your inbox or RSS feed reader. Pick the 10 most interesting and apply. Make a couple of cover letters for different kind of roles you are interested in and tweak them to make it sound personal. It will take you less than 10 minutes to apply on a job with a “personal” cover letter. Count about 3 hours to do so and applying on 50 jobs per week should get you anywhere between 1 and 5 interviews per week. You can then spend the next 5 hours of your day for sharpening your interview skills (free job centre resources), having real interviews, tweaking your website, making new connections on LinkedIn, joining new groups on LinkedIn, networking at different events, blogging, volunteering, taking courses/classes/certifications. Every single hour should be an investment in your career and a step forward, something that will lead you to a job or will enrich your resume.

There is definitely a big part of chance in the process, but you can improve your odds of finding a great job if you do the above. You will also need someone to support you, a wife, a husband, a friend, a parent for the times when everything goes wrong. The week you will have sent 50 resumes and went to 3 interviews and get nothing in return will be a tough week, but it’s not the end of it. Keep working at it and you’re putting the odds in your favor and sharpening the saw.

What are your tricks and tips to become a sexy job seeker and increase your odds of getting the perfect jobs? What do you think doesn't work versus what really works?

Good luck all!

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February 24th – Business Idea #24

Matt Baril — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:31:11 +0000

Idea #24 Google maps & house/apt listing mash-up so users can lookup by location

My wife and I are currently looking to move downtown Vancouver and use a combination of apt listings and Google maps. I find it annoying because I can easily sort results by price, pet friendliness, balcony and the such, but there is no way to go from one location (e.g. your work) and see what's available close by on a map. There could be a very simple system showing dots on the map and when the users click on it a small box expands and gives the general information: price, size, pet friendliness, smoker, utilities, etc. For more information, then the users can click a link in the box that would take them to the original posting.

Quick, easy and user friendly. Looking for a place to live by location makes much more sense to me than anything else. Most listings will let you look in a region, but then you have to click on all of them one at a time to see how close it is to where you want to be.

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February 16th – Business Idea #16

Matt Baril — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:57:49 +0000

Idea #16 Automatic job feeds customized by industries and cities delivered to you be email or RSS

Since I added the top 150 Tech jobs in Vancouver listing to this site, my blog has seen a boost in traffic and that page is now the most visited page of all. I have had many people contacting me to say how useful that listing was to them and it seems like that little feed that took me about 2-3 hours to put together is really meeting a general need. I thought a website could be set up on which there would be feeds of the best jobs for different cities and industries. Someone would simply have to subscribe to the RSS feed or ask for daily email digest. It's simple, fast, convenient and inexpensive. Premium membership could be offered as well as charging employers to display job postings. Advertising could also bring in some extra revenues as usual.

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Job Posting Is Back on Track

Matt Baril — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:47:33 +0000

Google seems to have fixed the problems with feedburner that kept the feed from displaying properly. You can now enjoy the full job listing updated automatically displaying the 150 most recent tech jobs in BC!

If you were to experience any problems, please let me know by using the form under the contact me tab at the top of this page.

Cheers,

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February 4th – Business Idea #4

Matt Baril — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:31:45 +0000

Idea #4 Events feed aggregator that would include hundreds of feeds & would make find events easy

There are many websites specialized in creating and sharing events such as upcoming.yahoo.com, meetup.com, and facebook amongst other. It would be great and probably technically easy to create a feed aggregator which is a platform that would fetch all the events of all these different websites and make searching through them easy. Websites like SimplyHired.com and Indeed.com are feed aggregators for job postings and as far as I know there is no such a thing for events. This website would come up with a list of events in your area based on your location and would offer different categories such as parties, games, conferences, etc. Money could be made by charging premiums for having an event to come up at the top of the list and selling general advertising.

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Top 150 Most Recent Tech Jobs in Vancouver

Matt Baril — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:11:24 +0000

As I just completed my BBA, I'm officially a job seeker. Good times! Fortunately, people living in Vancouver have access to many resources online, most of them for free. However, their number makes it difficult to keep up with all of them and I ended up spending most of my time surfing all these websites in search for new postings.

I got tired of manually looking for new jobs and decided to use RSS feeds to make one big feed of all the tech jobs in Vancouver. I used Yahoo! Pipes to aggreagte, sort, and trunk the many RSS feeds and feedburner to display the feed on my website. I was quite impress by Yahoo! pipes easiness to use and its power, definitely worth a look at.

These jobs are taken from websites such as symplyhired.ca (which already aggregates all major job boards e.g. monster, CareerBuilder, etc.), techjobsvancouver.com, craigslist.com and google search. All the jobs are filtered in order to be targeted for Tech people living in Vancouver, BC and are sorted from most recent to least recent. Clicking on the job title will bring you to the website that has originally published the job post.

Working with RSS feeds means that everything is done automatically and I do not host these job postings, it's merely a collection of links. As such, I cannot delete a job post that is irrelevant and I cannot be held responsible for the content.

Lastly, you can subscribe to the master RSS feed if you want to save yourself the hassle of visiting the same page all the time. Click here and add the feed to your favorite RSS reader. I also invite you to share your favorite job boards so I can include them!

Hope you'll like it and good luck!

Top 150 Most Recent Jobs in Vancouver

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