Website Review: Searchles.com

If you’re a client of Career Horizons, or have attended any of our job search training classes over the past few years, chances are you’re already well acquainted with the Indeed.com job hunting website.  In fact, you’ve probably had our help in developing an advanced “Boolean keyword search string” for Indeed that combs through the site’s massive pool of job listings on a daily basis and automatically e-mails you any opportunities that match your qualifications and interests.

But what if we’ve missed something in this search algorithm?  What if there are some other listings on the site that might be of interest to you, but which somehow aren’t getting picked up using the search parameters you have in place now?  Well, thanks to a new site we’ve come across called Searchles, there’s an easy way to explore this possibility.  This elegant little site is built upon the assumption that the more closely the words in a given job description match the words on your resume, the more likely the lead in question would be of interest to you.  So when you visit Searchles, all you have to do is paste a copy of your resume into the box provided and enter a target zip code.  At that point, the site will analyze all of your resume keywords and bring up a set of Indeed.com results ranked in order of how closely the language in each advertisement seems to match your resume terminology.  Pretty nifty, eh?

As for how well this keyword-matching technology actually works and how many relevant “new” leads this approach will turn up for any given job hunter who is already using Indeed.com, that’s pretty hard to say at this point.  We’d need to have a solid baseline to work with in terms of knowing the exact leads an individual job hunter has turned up through their own efforts, week after week, in comparison to what the Searchles site uncovers.  Our hope, however, is that some of you will test out this site in the near future and let us know how well you think it performs.  Does it add value to your efforts?  Or simply duplicate a bunch of stuff you’ve already seen?  Off the cuff, it seems likely that some of the hits that come up would be pretty random, since the site is firing blindly and not able (it doesn’t appear) to evaluate your resume keywords in any meaningful context.  But we also can’t rule out the possibility that this type of crude “more keywords = better lead” approach could be pretty powerful, too, and turn up some great leads one might miss otherwise.

So if you have a few minutes,  give this site a whirl.  I think you’ll find it pretty interesting.  For what it’s worth, too, this job search engine is just one small offshoot of the overall Searchles.com website — which is actually more of an Internet shopping destination, at heart — so remember to specifically bookmark the http://jobs.searchles.com web page, going forward, instead of focusing on the main www.searchles.com address.

Website Review: Gist.com

Wow, technology is getting slicker and slicker with each passing day!

One of the latest offerings in the red-hot online contact management space is the tool Gist.com, founded by several enterprising entrepreneurs in Seattle.  Gist promises to help you “know more about who know” and to “build strong relationships by connecting the inbox to the web to provide business-critical information about the people and companies that matter most.”  Perhaps a simpler way of putting it would be to say that Gist lets you build a list of all your contacts on the web, then track a whole bunch of useful information about them automatically, such as the number of times you send/receive e-mail from them, how often they blog/tweet, how often they get mentioned in cyberspace, and so forth.  Essentially, it creates a “dashboard” that pulls in a constant stream of information from LinkedIn, Outlook, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and other sites so that you have all of this important data right at your fingertips.

Is this site a good one for job hunters to utilize, however?  That’s a tricky question.  My review of this site, in fact, is probably the most polarized one I’ve ever had to write.  On one hand, this site does some amazingly innovative and powerful things.  For starters, the very fact that it’s able to collect and organize information from all of the sources above, in one place, is pretty darn handy.  At a glance, you can monitor which of your contacts are getting visibility out on the web or publishing news about their latest ventures.  You also can rank each contact from 1-100 in terms of their “importance” to you, which may sound judgmental, but is a very important aspect of maintaining a solid, strategic network.  Kudos to Gist for including this feature, which I haven’t seen anywhere else!  Lastly, one nifty inclusion that I love is how the system has a button next to each contact that is colored green, yellow, or red based on how long it’s been since you last communicated with them in some fashion.  This “Contact” icon helps ensure you stay in frequent touch with the folks who are important to you, an aspect of networking I preach about constantly.  So this simple little reminder system is a wonderful thing.

Despite these tremendous features, however, I’ll confess I’m not yet fully convinced that these kinds of tools are the ideal method that professionals today should be using to manage their contacts.  After trying out a number of them over the past few years, I still have a number of reservations.  For starters, I’m concerned that one would rely on ANY website as the #1 repository for their critical relationship data.  I’m not so much worried about the privacy factor, since sites seem to be clamping down on that aspect of things pretty well, but what if somehow all of your precious data gets lost, or corrupted, or accidentally deleted?  Or the company goes out of business?  Far stranger things have happened on the Internet, as we all know, and should one of these calamitous events take place, your entire networking schema would be instantly crippled.  Secondly, as smart as the technology is getting, it still frequently “guesses wrong” about what news items belong with what individuals.  For example, when trying out Gist, myself, I noticed there was a news article attached to one of my contacts that said he and his whole family had been killed in a car crash!  After a moment of panic, I did some further digging and found out that it was (sadly, but thankfully) a totally different person who just happened to share the same name.

Additionally, despite the broadband revolution, it still worries me that I’d only be able to access my contact data when connected to the Internet somehow — and I’ve also found that updating the records on this site, or any similar site, is a laboriously SLOW process.  If I’m trying to update a bunch of records in a hurry, or take notes, there’s a world of difference between the speed at which I could do this in Outlook, or Act, or Goldmine, or another piece of “installed” software versus a website where you have to click Save buttons, refresh pages, and the like.  You can’t afford to have networking feel like a chore.  So based on this reason, alone, I’d become frustrated quite quickly if I had to rely on a site like Gist as the primary source for managing my networking activities.

In closing, while it’s just one man’s opinion, I’d give the folks at Gist.com an “A for effort” and salute them for building a truly impressive application.  The site is also still in beta form, to be fair, so we could certainly see some major improvements unveiled in the months to come.  Honestly, though, given the importance of networking to the job hunting and business development process, I’m not sure the whole world is ready to gravitate to this type of solution.  If you’re building your network from scratch, and don’t already have a contact management system in place, Gist.com might be a great place to start.  If you’ve already got hundreds or thousands of records pulled together, however, and an effective system for managing them, I don’t see a compelling reason to make the switch.

Different strokes for different folks, though.  Are any of my readers out there already using Gist?  And if so, would you agree, disagree, or add anything to my analysis of the tool?

WTIA Event & Job Website

Do your career prospects even REMOTELY relate to the world of technology?   If so, do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with the many useful offerings of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) if you haven’t done so already.  As the trade association for over 1,000 Washington State high-tech companies, WTIA is a clearinghouse of useful information, events, and resources related to the entire spectrum (e.g. software, mobile, Internet, hardware, etc.) of tech-related companies here in the local area.

Why is this subject on  my brain?  Because I’m actually delivering two speeches today on “Marketing Yourself Successfully” as part of the WTIA’s wonderful “Back to Work” event.  I’ve already got the first speech under my belt, in fact, and am just sitting here in the break room recharging my introvert batteries before I head out for round two.  If you weren’t able to attend this event, and were interested in the material presented, you’ll find a link to my slides here that you’re more than welcome to download and review — although you’ll miss out on all of my brilliant ad-libs and color commentary, of course…

Additionally, let me be one of the first to tell you about the brand-new WTIA Job Center that the organization has just launched, since this employment portal is likely going to be gaining a lot of steam in the months to come — and will undoubtedly emerge as one of the top sources of local technology industry jobs.  Right now, there are 178 open positions listed in the system, ranging from senior account executive to embedded software engineer, but expect this number to grow as the fine folks at WTIA continue to promote this hiring resource aggressively among their corporate membership.

Make sure you check out their Industry Directory, too.  It’s a terrific source for turning up technology company prospects, whether of the startup or gargantuan variety!

Website Review: 2 New Career Change Tools

In catching up on my news reading this morning, I saw several announcements mentioning that job-board giant CareerBuilder.com has just launched two new tools designed to assist professionals who are interested in switching careers — so I decided to kick the tires of these sites to see if they were any good.

Before I share my findings, however, let me just say that the process of exploring new careers (especially for mid-career professionals) is a much more challenging, complex, and unpredictable exercise than most people initially realize.  For starters, while high school and college students often have the luxury/freedom of “starting from scratch” and pursuing whatever career path most interests them, many older adults are not quite so lucky, and have to take into consideration other factors such as maintaining a certain income level, finding time to go back to school, and/or uncovering a path around the “overqualified” stigma.  Additionally, every formal career test I’ve ever encountered has the built-in limitation of containing a few thousand occupational avenues in its database, at most, and therefore provides precious little insight into the 98,000 other job niches estimated to exist out in the marketplace — especially the newest, most exciting professions that are constantly emerging in the marketplace.

These bugaboos aside, though, there are definitely some useful websites out there that can help a great deal with the career brainstorming process, so I’m always on the lookout for tools that can help people explore their options from new and different angles.  So here’s what I thought of the two new offerings that CareerBuilder has just rolled out:

#1) CareerBuilder’s CareerPath Tool

This site is pretty straightforward.  You pick from a menu of choices related to your skills and knowledge, type in the level of formal education you’ve attained, and then hit the “search” button to see what comes up.  So when I typed in my own data as a test, emphasizing skills such as writing and knowledge of human resources, the top listing that came back was “Electrical & Electronic Equipment” assembler.  Say what?  Umm, that’s about 180 degrees off from what I’d expect or would ever be interested in.  And then, a bit farther down, the career of “coroner” made an appearance, which was pretty amusing — since another test I took a few years ago said I’d be a great funeral director.  At any rate, among my top 10 results, there were only three that seemed even reasonably on target, which were economist, editor, and education administrator.  So at first blush, I wasn’t too terribly impressed with the matching that took place between my competencies and the potential “ideal career” options that were returned, but the site is still in beta testing mode, so maybe the algorithm will improve over time.  Or maybe I should just bite the bullet, accept my fate, and cuddle up to some cadavers…

#2) CareerBuilder’s CBSalary.com Tool

The second tool that CareerBuilder has whipped up for career-changers tackles the subject from a completely different angle.  On the CBSalary site, you simply answer two questions: how much money do you want to make and where do you want to work?  The site then spits out a list of all the job titles that fit your target salary range in the particular geographic region you’ve identified — which you can then refine by picking certain occupational clusters like Advertising, Beauty Care, Engineering, etc.  In some ways, this is a pretty rough-and-tumble approach to the challenge of career exploration, but I’ll admit that I like this tool even better than the one above, since the results are much deeper (there are many more niche job titles included) and the income level of a career path often tends to be the most important factor mid-career professionals first need to consider.  I know dozens of folks who would be terrific teachers, in other words, but who aren’t in a position — egoically or economically — to start their careers over at $34,000 a year!

So if you, yourself, are thinking about jumping into a phone booth and changing up your occupational identity, I’d strongly encourage you to play around with these two new sites to see what you think.  If nothing else, they’re totally free, and I’m also delighted that they don’t make you jump through a bunch of hoops before you can start generating results.  At the end of the day, I still don’t believe these kinds of sites are “the answer” in terms of how most mid-career folks should go about discovering their new calling, but they’re worth exploring, at the very least!

Website Review: 15SecondPitch.com

Even though people rarely talk in elevators anymore, due to the newfangled video screens and such, legend has it that business owners and salespeople used to stalk busy executives until they’d board an elevator — at which point the assertive salesperson would “pitch” their captive audience during the 30-60 seconds it would take for the lift to arrive at its destination.  If they said something brief, captivating, and compelling, they might luck out and land a sales meeting.  If they droned on — and didn’t finish their pitch before the elevator stopped moving — they were pretty much sunk.

From these humble beginnings, the concept of the “elevator pitch” was born, and now this infamous message represents an integral step that ALL relationship-focused individuals need to master — whether they are professional salespeople, entrepreneurs, or one of the many job hunters out there seeking to “sell” themselves to a potential employer.

Given these factors, my curiosity was piqued when I stumbled across a website called 15SecondPitch.com the other day.  The creation of Laura Allen, a professional marketing consultant, the site offers a wealth of advice, information, and examples about how to craft a 15-second introduction to yourself that is “concise, compelling, and conversational.”  Does the site deliver on this promise?  Well, yes and no.  On the positive side, there’s some great “pitch” tips that you can access via Ms. Allen’s blog and free newsletter.  Even better, you should watch the “before and after” video clips she has available on the site, since these will give you some powerful examples of people improving their E.P. messages in a hurry, and the production value of these clips is downright exceptional.  Of course, the skeptic in me suspects that the people in the video might have been actors, or at the very least told to act dopey and tongue-tied in the opening “before” part, but the montage still gets the key point across in a big way.

The part of the site I didn’t care for much?  It was the big flashy “Pitch Wizard” tool in the center of the home page.  After taking the time to click on this intriguing feature, and answer the set of four short questions that came up, I assumed some kind of special magic was going to happen and the computer (don’t ask me how) was going to polish my raw text into some type of glowing, brilliant presentation.  Instead, it simply joined the four sentences of text I had entered into a single paragraph, and said “voila, here’s your pitch!”  This was underwhelming, to say the least, and I’m not sure one needs to go through the trouble of creating a fancy Flash application to repeat a person’s exact words back to them.

At any rate, the 15SecondPitch site is worth a quick pit stop, at the very least, and is concentrated on a specific messaging component that is sorely needed by a great many job hunters out there!

Career Website: 360°Reach Assessment

Having trouble differentiating yourself in a crowded marketplace?  Confused about where you stand out compared to your peers?  Looking for a boost of confidence and the chance to get back in touch with your proven strengths and talents?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you might benefit tremendously by checking out the “360 Reach” assessment tool offered by Reach Personal Branding.  Available here, this handy online resource makes it easy for you to reach out to a bunch of your friends, associates, and former colleagues to get their input on your professional strengths and to solicit their candid feedback on your most valuable, successful qualities as an individual.  The tool is offered in both a basic (free) and premium (paid) version, and once you feed it the names and contact information of the people you want to survey, it will send them an automated list of questions related to your strengths, weaknesses, key “brand” attributes, the role they see you playing on teams, etc.  These individuals can then respond anonymously to the questions, if desired, as well as add any additional comments they’d like to pass along about your capabilities.

As you can imagine, this kind of third-party feedback can be extremely useful to professionals going through job transition.  Not only is it critical to know what sets you apart from other competing parties in today’s market, but you also have much to gain by receiving an “objective” view of your strengths given the fact that it’s near-impossible to see yourself the way others (including employers) will see you — and the odds are that you’re underselling yourself or taking some of your best qualifications for granted!  More than likely, too, you’ll be amazed by some of the positive input you receive from your circle of supporters.  One of my clients went through the system recently, in fact, and commented that “the feedback I’ve received so far is blowing me away with information about myself.”

So if you’re courageous enough to give the system a try and ask people for their input, you can sign up for the free version, which will allow you to send out the initial questionnaire and then access the results (as they stream in) for 15 days at no charge.  Beyond that point, you’ll need to pay $15 to view the data for an initial 30 days, or you can step up to the $50 subscription level and receive a full report and some feedback analysis about your results, as well.  So sure, there’s a “catch” involved of sorts, but for a valuable product that promises to give you a “focused portrait of your professional reputation” the investment could definitely turn out to pay dividends in your career, going forward…

Career Website: WhosTalkin.com

Got another Internet-based “power tool” to pass along, if you haven’t already heard of it!  The website WhosTalkin.com is essentially a “social media search engine” that stands to become a valuable part of any serious job seeker’s repertoire, since it can help you sleuth out some great background information on the various executives you’ll be interviewing with — as well as tap into some deep, thought-provoking discussions on thousands of business topics, in general.

Here’s a more detailed description of the site’s capabilities, taken directly from the site itself: “WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most.  Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most. Our search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.  We take this data and display it to you through our carefully designed interface that harnesses the power of AJAX to give you a seamlessly well organized user experience.”

I suppose the non-engineers among us don’t really need to know that least part, about AJAX, but you’ve got to give the owners of the site credit for being thorough!

As for how to integrate this tool effectively into your own job search campaign, I’d recommend you first save it as a “bookmark” or “favorite place” and then get into the habit of running any contact/company names through it, prior to upcoming interviews.  In fact, just to get the hang of it, you might try searching WhosTalkin.com right now using the names of 5-10 executives or influential folks you’ve worked with in the past, just to see if anything shows up.  Alternatively, you could also search on some specific topics (e.g. employee retention, business intelligence, financial analysis, cloud computing, etc.) that are closely related to your background and field of expertise, just to see what kind of information is out there on the social media channels.

One tip, though.  When searching for any company, topic, or contact name containing more than a single word, make sure to encase your search phrase in quoteation marks (i.e. “matt youngquist” instead of matt youngquist) so that the search looks for your keywords together, as a single phrase, as opposed to seperately.  You’ll get far better results…

Website Review: PDFDig.com

Interested in comparing your resume against those of your peers/competitors?  Or finding a sheet of helpful tips for introverted job seekers?  Or reading through a “career change checklist” to help plot your course to a new occupation?  If so, there’s a great new website called PDFDig that I’d recommend you get acquainted with!

This website was just brought to my attention the other day by a good samaritan who added a comment about the resource to one of my blog postings from long, long ago.  And after playing around with the site for just a few days, I’m hooked!  The concept is an incredibly simple one.  Almost deceptively so, in fact, since all the PDFDig site appears to do is scour the Web for PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files on every topic under the sun and then collect them all in one place for easy searchability.  It’s basically like a “Google” for PDF files — and while you can search Google exclusively for PDF files, as well, it requires a few extra steps.  So for now, I’d recommend the PDFDig site for this purpose, which makes the process even more simple and streamlined.

So pay the site a visit and just start searching away on topics that interest you.  You’ll be amazed at what you find out there among the millions of Acrobat files stored in cyberspace.  In addition to the subjects I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I’ve turned up some great documents on how to write a business plan, how to negotiate a raise with your boss, how to get a job in grantwriting, how to determine the right rates to charge as a freelancer, how to find work in France, and so on, and so forth.

The sky’s truly the limit in terms of the resources you might uncover, and while there are no guarantees in terms of the quality of what you turn up, many of the resources look extremely credible and professional.  The sheer depth of written work the site catalogues, in fact, reminds me of the old saying “If an infinite number of monkeys were to start banging away on an infinite number of typewriters, they’d eventually rewrite the complete works of Shakespeare…”

Website Review: Google Profiles

Are you ready for this?  Google, of all companies, is now jumping into the on-line networking game and has launched a new feature called Google Profiles where people can create a free page that talks all about themselves, their interests, where they grew up, etc.

I’m not sure whether this will turn out to be another great Google innovation we’ll all wonder how we lived without, or whether it’s a sign of the pending apocolypse, instead, but if this thing catches on it could be BIG.  It not only will go directly up against sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that allow people to create an easy link to a bunch of information about themselves, for job hunting and other purposes, but it will also ensure that all participating professionals have their personal data captured in digital form for all eternity.  Sure, creating a profile is totally optional and there are a number of privacy settings one can deploy, but the bottom line is that almost nobody is going to be able to “hide” anymore if the world starts revolving around these types of tools and technologies.

Don’t get me wrong, however.  Google did a nice job in executing this new application and overall it’s very approachable and user-friendly.  Admittedly, I don’t quite get the point of asking people to describe their “superpower” or list “the one thing they can’t find via Google” on their profile, but I guess they’re trying to add some fun and whimsy into the site, which isn’t a terribly bad thing.

As for whether this new tool will take off?  Bet on it.  As much as Facebook and its social networking brethen have captured the imagination of millions of people around the globe, this number is dwarfed by the billions of people who use Google — and I also think the Google brand has become incredibly strong, to the point where many people will start using this new Profile site simply because it comes with the G-word attached.

So if you’re paranoid about identity theft or worried about being tracked down by somebody you jilted or borrowed money from, years ago, creating a Google Profile may not be the right move for you.  But for the rest of us, jumping on the bandwagon right away might not be a bad idea.  Not only will doing so generate a little extra “PR” for ourselves, but you’ll also get the chance to grab a customized profile address with your name in it, while one is still available!

Website Review: TradeVibes.com

Interested in working for an Internet startup?  Want to know as much as you can about it before taking the plunge?  If so, TradeVibes is the latest in the wave of “full transparency” websites that seek to pull together a rich mix of both objective and subjective data to help job seekers (and others) research various organizations.

For example, on the objective data front, you can use TradeVibes’ advanced search screen to pull up detailed information on over 285 startup companies in Washington State.  The data available includes standard stuff like web address, location, phone numbers, and such, but also some pretty impressive info in terms of each company’s executive team, board of directors, funding status (e.g. Series A, Series B, Series C…) and the like.  I’ve never before seen this information compiled all in one place on so many companies, so the site gets a huge thumbs-up from me for this reason alone!

TradeVibes doesn’t stop there, however.  As you click on each company listing, you can discover whether the majority of site visitors are “bullish” or “bearish” regarding the organization’s future.  While such rating systems are far from an exact science, this information is still extremely useful if one is considering rolling the dice with a startup firm, especially since you can read many further details in the ongoing discussion threads that are tracked regarding each company.

So long story short, if you’re a job hunter or career professional interested in working within the Internet/Web sector, this site is definitely one to watch!  They’ve already gathered an impressive array of data on a staggering amount of start-up firms, so as soon as this site really catches on, the “subjective” aspect is likely going to get more and more valuable, over time.  Check it out…