Most job seekers who use the Internet to look for positions use one or more sites that cover a wide array of job openings. These may include Indeed, LinkedIn, SimplyHired, ZipRecruiter, Monster, CareerBuilder, GlassDoor, and others.
These sites encourage users to do two things: 1) Post their resume to the site, and 2) sign up for email alerts for new postings that may interest them. The first is an individual choice, balancing the potential opportunities with the loss of control of who sees your resume. The second, however, has for many of my clients resulted in a large amount of email traffic that is difficult to manage, and not always on point with what they are looking for.
Fortunately, there’s another approach available. You can access the content of most of these sites and many others with a simple Google search. Here are the steps:
1) From the standard Google search bar on your phone, tablet or desktop, enter your desired search string – just make sure it includes the word “jobs”. It can be as simple as jobs near me, or more complicated: financial customer service jobs near 60625.
2) If there are any matches, Google will return the first few jobs in formatted boxes. You will have to scroll down past the sponsored responses, marked by the word “Ad” in a box. At the bottom of formatted boxes, click the arrow or link to see all jobs matching the search. Once you have done this, you may use the filter buttons provided on the next screen to limit to jobs posted within a specified timeframe, or a specified radius in miles from your location.
3) You can try different variations of search strings to focus in on the jobs you want. You can use quotation marks to assure that a whole phrase is included, or a “-“ ahead of a term to exclude it, which is often useful if you are picking up particular jobs you are not interested in. Example: “social worker” jobs near 60010 –school would return social worker jobs, but exclude any school social work jobs or other social worker jobs that include school in their description.
4) Identify the most successful search string to cover what you are looking for.
5) Turn on the email digest feature at the top of the list of job results. You can turn this off later if you are not happy with the volume of results. (Note: You will have to be signed in to Google to use the email feature.)
6) You will get an email daily if new jobs appear meeting your criteria.
7) This method will capture all jobs from most major job sites (Indeed is not covered), as well as many individual company sites. For each job, it will give the best description found, and give you the option to go on to any of the sites where the job appears to submit your actual application.
Google apps on some iOS devices may not support this feature. However, if you access www.google.com from Safari or other browsers on the device, job search should be supported.
Google also does not cover Craigslist. For many job seekers, Craigslist should be part of their strategy. My next post will cover how best to use Craigslist to support your job search.