Employment Opportunities: Find a Job That Fits Your Skills

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Want to find a job?  The best tools around are the ones that everyone is using — you can tell because everyone is using them. The tools in question are, as you may have guessed, job boards.  But with millions of people using job boards every day, you have to do something a little different if you want to be at the head of the crowd. Here are the best techniques for finding employment opportunities on a job board:

How to Find a Job:  Employment Opportunities

•  Learn to Search: Searching a job board for employment opportunities is significantly more complex than typing a few words into Google. At the minimum, any decent job board is going to have three elements to their search: a category, a space for keywords, and some sort of location indicator (often a zip code). The location indicator is easy, and even the category is mostly straightforward — but learning to properly use the keywords field can take a lot of experience. For example, if you want to be a retail manager, you can look for “manager” — but you’ll find more positions (and better ones) in most cases if you search for “department”, “general”, or “shift” in addition to just “manager” (depending on your goal, naturally.)
• Automate, Automate, Automate:  When you find employment opportunities that you are interested in, you should  never automate your responses to a job listing (see the next item), but the more you automate your searches, the less time you have to spend looking and the more time you can spend replying. Many job boards allow you to create an RSS feed for any given search; others will allow you to set up an email digest of new relevant jobs for searches you’ve done in the past.
• Personalize, Personalize, Personalize: Don’t bother replying to jobs that don’t ‘click’ with you — that’s just wasting your time and theirs. But when you do find a job that you are interested in,  take the time to really sell yourself to them. Use the words that they used in their job listing to describe yourself (just make sure it’s true.) Give them every reason to accept you as a legitimate contender for the position, and don’t back down.  Use these employment opportunities to show them that they want you, and then show them that you want them — if you can do those two things, you won’t be on the job boards for long.
• Job Alerts:  Utilize the option of Job Alerts that many job boards offer.   By utilizing this feature you will be notified via email when positions fitting your search criteria become available.
• Employment Application:  Many companies provide the option to apply directly online by completing their employment application online.  Take advantage of this opportunity.  Remember never give out your social security, or banking information to anyone online.

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