Advanced Job Hunting Tricks

I attended a webinar last night given by a recruiter named Michael Webb (website). He talked about a few different things, but the one that really tickled my fancy was the wonders of Google Advanced Search. Two points:

1.) LinkedIn, a great networking tool does NOT necessarily give you a complete listing of matches to your search for people (and possibly jobs) when you use their search engine unless you are a paying customer. This is a marketing concept for them.

2.) Many small-to-medium size companies can not afford to post jobs to the "big hitter" jobsites like Career Builder, Monster, Hotjobs, Dice, etc... Where do these companies post their jobs? Craigslist. However, for all of you who have EVER used craigslist, you know that each geographical location listed off to the right has its OWN page including subregions. Sifting through all of this to find a job is a daunting, if not impossibly unproductive task.

Enter Google to the rescue.

In the Advanced Search page you can tell Google to search a specific website instead of the entire internet. For example: If you want to search for process engineering jobs on craigslist, you fill in the following:

this exact wording or phrase: process engineer
search within a site or domain: craigslist.org

Click on the Advanced Search button, and voila! You now have all of the jobs with the words "Process Engineer" in the title/body and without all of that messy clicking on every single region in every state/country that participates in craigslist.

Want to find a contact in a job target company on LinkedIn? You do the same thing:

all these words: (enter your search terms here)
this exact wording or phrase: (use if you know EXACTLY who/what you are looking for)
any of these unwanted words: directory (ALWAYS fill this in for LinkedIn searches)
search within this site or domain: linkedin.com

Click on the Advanced Search button, and it will pull up all of the people that have allowed their profile to be searchable and contain your specified keywords that are on LinkedIn.

Important Note: This illustrates the importance of making your profile as complete and common as possible. If someone is trying to find *YOU* for a job and you put in your profile that you are a manager but abbreviated it as "mgr", that will only come up if the person is searching for "mgr" instead of "manager". As an interesting aside, do an EGO search and try to find yourself using Google to see how easy it is.

One last trick he mentioned:

Have you ever seen a job posting where the poster for some reason did not want to be found? They put NO contact information on the posting. I don't mean they used their email (for you to do a search on the domain), but NO information at all. One thing to try is to find a unique phrase in the job description and paste it into a google search. Michael said that HR people are as overworked as the rest of us. It is very possible that they are simply copying and pasting job descriptions from one posting location to another. If they posted the job on the COMPANY website, this may allow you to find out who to call.

Michael's summary was: Resumes don't land jobs, people do. In a job search, it is particularly important to set yourself apart. Find out who is doing the hiring and instead of being just another one of the tens or hundreds of resumes on the desk of an overworked HR employee, be one of the one or two that he ACTUALLY talked to. Stand out from the crowd.