Organize Your Search!

One of the most important things you need to do for yourself is to decide HOW you are going to keep track of your job search.  Some of the basic items you will need to keep organized:

• Network contacts, their contact information, how you know them, when you last had contact with them and what you spoke about
• Target companies, contact and physical location information, website, key contacts inside the company
• Recruiters, their contact information, which companies they work with
• Jobs you’ve applied for, including job description, when you submitted your application, when you’ve had interviews, with whom, and whether or not the job status is still open or closed.

You will need to determine what method works best for you — a notebook, manilla folders, a binder you carry with you, an excel spreadsheet on your computer, etc.  This was a big struggle for me personally when starting my job search in 1Q08.  There was just so much inter-related information that this Excel junkie knew that one spreadsheet wouldn’t cut it.  I tried using the Open Office version of MS Access to build a database (Bill Gates gets no money from the Richtforts), but the Wizard wouldn’t cooperate with me.

I ended up going back to the paper based method —  bought myself a brand spanking new 3 inch 3-ring binder, a bunch of binder inserts to hold business cards and clear plastic insert page protectors, to hold an 8.5 by 11″ sheet of paper to track basic info and ongoing contact logs for each network contact and each target company.  I also had the IL Department of Employment Services’ .pdf file to be used for keeping a log of each position I applied for.  It worked ok, but was all very bulky to carry around.

Approximately 5 months into my full-blown job search, one of my job search work-team members mentioned an online Contact Relationship Management system designed specifically for people conducting a job search (as opposed to Salesforce.com for sales organizations).  It is JibberJobber, and it is a great value buy — a free account gives you a lot of flexibility, and you can up- or down-grade between the free vs. paid levels as needed without losing any of your information (e.g., if you land and your search goes dormant for a while).  I recently upgraded to a 3-month gold level plan for a whopping $29.  

 

Some of the WOW factor for me with JibberJobber is that it was created by someone who had lost his own job — Jason Alba — he’s been there, done that!  You can store electronic copies of documents (i.e., resumes, cover letters, hand bills) and associate them with specific people or jobs, so you can track what you sent whom.  You can copy in the text of specific jobs you’ve applied for, so you don’t have to hunt around for website pages or kill trees printing out job descriptions.  You can load in your “elevator speech(es).”  You can add in a list of commonly asked interview questions and your answers to those questions. 

Best of all, for a geek like me, all your information is stored online if, heaven forbid, your computer crashes or the dog eats your networking binder…  There was a guy in my job search work team last year whose computer died horribly, and he lost hundreds of networking contact records as well as his status tracker for how far along he was on all the different jobs he was pursuing. 

I’m just sayin’…