Some Random Thoughts About Job Hunting: Part 1

It’s the time of year for beaches, picnics, high school/college graduations and…job hunting? If you’re a recent high school or college graduate, you are probably torn: on one hand, you want to have a fun filled, relaxing summer. However, the knowledge that you have now entered “the real world” threatens to impinge on your enjoyment of the wonderful weather and summer activities. So, instead of getting outside and swimming, going on a walk, eating ice cream or whatever else, you’re stuck inside with your laptop, trying to find some form of employment that will a). last longer than the summer season and b). not make you dislike going to work every day. That’s partially the case for me, anyway. I’m finishing up subbing for the school year and I’m starting my camp job in a few weeks, but I’m also working on finding a job for the fall that has a specific number of hours each week that I can count on, and that will help in career development in some way. I just wanted to share a few of my thoughts (and a few helpful links) that I hope will be enlightening, and make the process less painful for you.

Thought number 1: If you stick to the popular job sites, you’ll be missing out on a lot of job opportunities.
Websites like monster.com and careerbuilders.com are popular, and with good reason; they’re well advertised, are pretty easy to navigate, and they have a decent number of openings. If you limit your search to these sites though, you’ll miss out on tons of jobs. So, what to do? Try some of the following links next time you want to search for your next job.
- www.indeed.com Indeed is different from most job sites, because it is basically a conglomerate of other job sites. This makes job hunting a lot easier; instead of searching a ton of individual job sites, this is a one stop shop for advertised positions.
- Your local chamber of commerce. This is a good way to find specific businesses in your area that you are interested in, or to find those you never knew existed. You’ll have to go to individual company web sites to search their postings, but I found a lot of jobs this way that I didn’t find through other sources.
- Twitter and Linked In. If you live near a decent sized metro area, there’s a good possibility that you’ll be able to follow a twitter account that is dedicated to posting links for open positions in the area. On Linked In, joining groups or following companies is a good way to find out about job openings as well.
- Your college or university job board. I’m not talking about the student job board (although it can be helpful). I’m referring to a job board that allows both current students and alumni to sign up and search for jobs through a database; this includes everything from full time positions, to internships, and everything else you can imagine. I recently checked out lakerjobs (the job board for GVSU), and was surprised by the number of openings present on there, but that I hadn’t seen on other websites. If you're not sure if your university has a database like this or have no idea where to find it, check with the career office.

This is turning out to be longer than I thought. To be continued...