After reading my article, The Organized Job Search, NS emailed me to ask:
You mention in your article that “there are wonderful software programs available that can help you with organizing your job search contacts”. Do you know of any web sites where you can do this job search organization, with the same functionality?
The only online job search organizer that I’m familiar with is Jobfiler. It includes all the components you would expect to find in a personal information manager, including a contact list, to-do list, calendar, and bookmarks, but set up specifically to accommodate the needs of most job seekers. Because the information is located separately from your other information, you don’t have to worry about temporary job search contacts getting mixed in with your permanent personal and professional contacts. In addition, since it’s web-based, you can access it from your library or employment centre if you don’t have a home computer, or if you find it difficult to conduct your job search at home due to small children or other distractions. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks.
For starters, the site hasn’t been updated in several years, and it contains broken links and outdated job postings. In addition, the designer did not consider cross-browser compatibility, and the site doesn’t display or function properly in Firefox. The Jobseeker Desktop works in Internet Explorer, but not the way you might expect it to. For example, the Job Inquiries section where you enter the details about your applications doesn’t include fields for contact information. Instead, that goes in a separate Contact section, and there’s no way to cross reference them.
As an alternative, you could use an online customer relationship management system such as Zoho CRM – after all, a job seeker is essentially a sales person who is selling his or her own talents rather than a product – but I find it hard to believe that no one has developed an up-to-date website for organizing job search information. JobFish 2008 is CRM software which looks like it would do the trick very nicely, but many people, like NS, prefer the convenience of an online tool.
Can you help NS? Do you know of a really good online job search organizer?
G.L. Hoffman contacted me via Twitter to let me know about two websites for organizing job search info: JibberJobber and The Job Tracker.
NS just emailed me say he’d found another one: http://www.virtualjobcoach.com.
Hi Janet,
One way of approaching this task would involve the use of either http://www.igoogle.com or http://www.netvibes.com. The job seeker would just add what they need in the way of calendars, task lists, RSS feeds and so on. Two nice things about this way: (1) it’s free, and (2) there are lots of widgets so the job seeker can customise the way that their job search page looks.
Bill
Bill, those are handy tools too, but I don’t think they have a contact management database, which is what he is looking for. Sometimes you have to invest a little money to get just what you need!