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Job Search Tips – The One Day, One Job Blog

This is the One Day, One Job Blog.

While most of what we do consists of spotlighting entry level employers, we occasionally publish in-depth articles on new and interesting job search tactics. You will find these articles below.

Making Job Search Social

by on November 3, 2008

Job Action Day Logo

This post is part of Job Action Day, “a day of empowerment for workers and job-seekers,” that is aimed to help you “put your career and job in the forefront, making plans, taking action steps.”

I was an anti-social job searcher. I never stepped foot in my college’s Career Services office. I didn’t want to talk to my parents about jobs. I never attended any Career Fairs. I was too embarrassed to tell my friends how much I was struggling with finding jobs that interested me. I was relying almost entirely on the Internet for my job search needs, and it wasn’t helping. Eventually, I quit. I decided that I was going to make online job search better by building a resource that I would have wanted to use during my job search. I empowered myself to face a problem and solve it, and in a few short months I went from knowing nothing about job search even though I needed a job, to knowing a ton about job search despite the fact that I was no longer looking.

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Job Action Day is Monday

by on October 31, 2008

Job Action Day Logo

Ok, I’m not one for fabricated holidays – especially when they’re crammed between two real holidays like Halloween an Election Day, but this one is important (and it doesn’t require sending anyone any gifts). It’s called Job Action Day, and it’s this Monday. It was initiated by Randall S. Hansen, the founder and publisher of Quintessential Careers, and he has invited me to participate in Job Action Day 2008, which is set for this Monday, November 3rd. I’m excited to be a part of this, because it’s a day for job-seekers and workers to confront the current economic crisis head-on and take action steps to improve their careers. (You can read the full press release here.)

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Someone Won an iPod Touch!

by on October 21, 2008

Congratulations to Alex Payne, a recent graduate of Duke University. He won the iPod Touch in our Tell a Friend, Win an iPod Touch Contest. You may remember Alex from our article on Using Facebook Ads for Job Search, as he was one of the initial participants in the experiment. His number was picked randomly by Microsoft Excel’s Random Number Generator, but we have to say that we’re happy to see him win.

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ODOJ iPod Touch Contest

Today is my birthday, and since I run this show, I want to extend the celebration to all of you. There’s nothing that I want more for my birthday than for you to tell your friends about One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship (sad, I know). Unfortunately, instead of that, I got an iPod Touch. That’d be really sweet, except I already have an iPhone. (Ok, I didn’t really get the iPod Touch for my birthday. I won it in a guest blogging contest on The Talent Buzz with a post about networking on Twitter, but let’s pretend it was a birthday gift.) Since I think that regifting is completely acceptable, I’m willing to trade my iPod Touch for your telling your friends about one or both of our sites. I want to give everybody a chance to win, so we’re going to turn this into a little contest.

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Jobs, No Experience Needed?

by on September 22, 2008

No experience and looking for a job? Try our job search engine.

Looking for your first job can be confusing. It’s hard to know what to search for, and even if you do find a job that looks interesting, it’s hard to tell if you have the required experience to actually land the job. Here on One Day, One Job, we write about entry level jobs for new college gradates. If you’re a college student or a new college grad, then you’re in the right place. We’re going to take a look at the intricacies of what “entry level” really means, and help you figure out how to determine what companies really mean when they list experience requirements on a job posting.

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Two weeks ago we brought you the results of our job search experiment in an article titled Use Facebook Ads to Make Employers Hunt You Down (don’t want to read it, listen to my interview about the experiment with Chris Russell from Secrets of the Job Hunt podcast). We found that Facebook ads were an extremely effective medium for catching an employer’s attention. This week, LinkedIn, a professional networking site, announced their own advertising platform. That begged the obvious question: Can LinkedIn be used in a similar way to target employers with ads that link to your resumé?

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If you pay any attention to the news, you might think that anyone who is looking for a job should immediately cancel his or her Facebook membership and never sign up again. Headlines read: Bank Intern Busted by Facebook, Employers Look at Facebook Too, and Employers Snoop on Facebook. There’s rarely anything new in the stories, but somehow they continue to pop up in all sorts of media outlets. More and more companies are using Facebook as a recruiting tool (and those who aren’t yet should hire us to help them), but for the most part any press that has included the words “employer” and “Facebook” has been negative. Not anymore.

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Here at One Day, One Job, we’re always trying to figure out how to make it easier for college students to find great entry-level jobs. Networking is one of the best ways to land a job, and online social networking sites make networking a lot easier. We’ve found a few really exciting ways to integrate social networking site into your job search – some of which we’ve already mentioned in articles and posts. Other techniques we’re still researching and experimenting with, and we’ll be bringing those to you in article form soon. We’ve also come up with a new idea that you won’t even need to read about to use.

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How to Get Any Job with Any Major by Don Asher

This book review is a guest post by Makafui Fiavi. She is a Junior Policy Analysis and Global Health major at Cornell University. One day, she would like to work in the area of healthcare delivery for an international organization such as the World Health Organization, World Vision, or CARE. In her spare time she enjoys hanging out with friends, reading, and learning how to play the guitar. If you would like to guest post for One Day, One Job or One Day, One Internship by writing a book review, employer profile, or blog post, please e-mail info@onedayonejob.com.

If you’re browsing the library or bookstore shelves this summer for career advice, you should definitely check out How to Get Any Job with Any Major by Donald Asher. I was personally drawn to the book sub-title, Career Launch and Re-launch for Everyone Under 30 (or how to avoid living in your parents’ basement). For someone who believed for a long time that the choice of a major in college defines or delimits the types of jobs you have in the real world, I was curious to see what insight the author had to offer.

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If you’re wondering what happened with this experiment, you can find all of the results in our post titled Use Facebook Ads to Make Employers Hunt You Down. There is a complete tutorial on how to use the method that we based the experiment on, so you no longer need to comment if you want to participate. You can just read about it and try it yourself. Be sure to let us know how it works for you.

A couple weeks ago we came up with an off the wall job search idea that we want to test. Since we’re not job searching ourselves, we’re looking for 10 volunteers who would like to be part of an experiment. This idea is pretty “out there,” but we think that it has the potential to be extremely effective. Participation will require a small time commitment (maybe an hour or two), but should be well worth it. We’ll be helping and coaching you along the way to ensure that you make the most out of our idea.

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You’re coaxed to login multiple times every day by the steady stream of e-mails. People have written on your wall, sent you private messages, commented on your pictures, tagged you in notes. Facebook is as addictive as a pack of cigarettes to a nicotine hungry smoker. You add a variety of information about yourself ranging from how you are feeling to where you are working. You probably have at least three bumper stickers (I have about 12). When you take a good picture, or something cool happens in real life, you probably think about how long it will be until you can upload it to Facebook. Your profile is you. People can have a favorable or unpleasant impression of you before they meet you in person based solely on your Facebook profile. You must keep it fresh. You cannot and will not be a lame bucket of blandness. Your page needs to show who you are (or who you want to be). Your Internet social status depends on it. This is your life.

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Getting from College to Career

Welcome to our second One Day, One Job Book Review. Our first review was of Alison Doyle’s Internet Your Way to a New Job, and today we’re going to discuss Lindsey Pollak’s Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World. The book may sound like a checklist (it even has boxes that you can check off as you complete the tasks), but it’s actually a great read. Lindsey’s insights are exceptional, and the tips are some of the best I’ve come across.

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Are you a Career Services professional who wants to add blogging to the ways that you communicate with your students? If so, we can help. We’re experts when it comes to getting college student engaged with career related information online, so shoot us an e-mail at willy@onedayonejob.com and let us know how we can get you started blogging.

A lot of people ask us, “Where do you find all the companies and jobs that you write about?” We’ve already told you about how we use Google, magazine lists, and television to find jobs, but we have a few other tricks up our sleeves as well. One is blogs – we use them a lot. Some of the most useful blogs are those published by career services offices at colleges and universities. They’re full of great tips and excellent entry-level job and internship opportunities. Although the blogs are usually geared towards the students of the school, they’re open to the public.

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Graduates

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by Amanda Barrett from MediaBistro.com, a career and community site for media professionals. She is their Associate Director of Marketing for Events and Education, and she wanted to tell me about a program that MediaBistro is running for new college grads who are looking for media jobs.

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Investor Relations Info for Your Job Search

It’s been a while since my last entry on One Day, One Job, but I thought that it was worth revisiting a topic that I wrote about back in February – Using the Internet to Become the Candidate of Choice. Executive bios and news releases are great research tools, but the Investor Relations pages on the websites of publicly traded companies provide a wealth of information about how a company is doing and what direction they are planning to take over the next year. Admittedly, the information found in investor relations is not as easy to digest as what you might see on a Recent News page, but clever deductions from Investor Relations information can pay dividends in an interview, pun intended.

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Choose Local Jobs

We keep hearing from readers that one of the hardest parts about a post-college job search is finding jobs specific to a given location. They know where they want to live, and, damn it, they’re going to live there no matter what it takes. Do you share that mindset? Maybe you’re dead set on living the New York City life after graduation, or you love windsurfing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter and have to be near somewhere like Hood River, OR to stay sane. Maybe you’ve decided to live with your parents to save money, or you have a significant other who is going to graduate school in a new city. There are a wide range of reasons that new college grads have for deciding on a location before they find a job, but the job search tactics and techniques for finding a locations specific job are the same regardless of the reasons.

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Internet Your Way to a New Job

We keeps saying that we’re going to put together a “One Day, One Job Book Store” with our recommendations for job search related reading, but we keep putting it off for other projects. Well, our hand was forced when we came across Alison Doyle’s new book, Internet Your Way to a New Job. It’s a great resource for any job searcher, but it is especially helpful for new grads who have never been through the process before. This is our first book review, but it certainly won’t be the last. As we build the One Day, One Job Book Store, these reviews will be integrated into it.

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We’re always trying to figure out how to better reach college students who are looking for jobs, because we think that we have something great to offer them. You can obviously help by telling your friends who are looking for jobs about us, but you can also help us with a little research project that we’re doing.

We want to know what kinds of Google searches college students use to find jobs. If you wouldn’t mind, please take 30 seconds to visit this site and fill out the search box. It will ask you to answer this question with a search: You are a college senior who is looking for your first job, what do you search for?

Thanks to everyone who helps us reach more students by participating in this research.

We’re taking a cue from Naomi Dunford’s post on IttyBiz called Let’s Play a Game – What’s Your Home Business? and adapting the idea to job search. By the way, here’s our response to Naomi’s post.

So.

Let’s play a game.

What kind of job are you looking for?

We always love to hear reader feedback, so we’re going to open this post up for our readers to leave comments. If you’re visiting One Day, One Job, then you’re probably looking for an entry-level job. Tell us what you’re looking for, so that we can better serve you with our daily posts and articles.

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We recently hired Naomi Dunford of Itty Biz Marketing to help us grow our readership and our business. We really like reading her blog, so we figured we’d see how she can help us. She recently wrote a post called What’s Your Home Business? which asks readers to talk about what they do. She says it’s amazing how often you interact with people without realizing that they could be potential friends, business partners, clients, or customers. We know that you read One Day, One Job, but do you know what we do?

Naomi’s Questions

Naomi posed the following questions in her post and invited her readers to answer them, so that’s what we’re doing. Read our answers and let us know if you’d like to work with us!

What’s your game? What do you do?

One Day, One Job is a blog about entry-level jobs (and One Day, One Internship is a blog about internships). We put ourselves in the shoes of college students, and we search for great companies who are looking to hire young talent. Every day, we profile one of the companies that we find and talk about the company’s employment offerings for college students and new grads. We also write in-depth articles about how to use the Internet to become a better job searcher.

Working on One Day, One Job has helped us figure out how to engage college aged job seekers online. Now, we want to help employers do the same. Since even the biggest companies can’t make recruiting visits to every campus, online communication between employers and college students is essential. This is something that we’ve mastered – just look at our archive of daily posts.

Our first offering to employers is our advertising package. Our readers are already engaged with us, we can help you reach them (as long as you meet our standards as an entry-level employer). Not only will your company get great candidates, but you’ll also significantly increase awareness of your employment brand.

Our second offering to employers consists of our consulting services, which are geared towards companies that want to make online communication with job seekers a business priority. Some areas that we specialize in are social media, blogging, search engine optimization, copy writing, viral content development, and Facebook advertising. We tend to focus our attention on entry-level recruiting, but the principles that we’ve learned apply at all levels.

Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?

I’ve job searched. It sucks. It’s not fun. It should be like shopping. The anticipation should be thrilling. Reading a job description should make you say, “I want to work there!” Not, “I guess I’ll send my resume – it only takes 30 seconds to e-mail it.”

I’ve also worked in HR at a company that had awesome brand recognition, but wasn’t using it effectively to attract top talent. Not only was the company missing out on great candidates, but the candidates were missing out on great jobs because they didn’t know about them. It was a bummer.

Job search is important, and I think that One Day, One Job can make the process better for both sides.

Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?

College students are our customers! They may not pay us for the services that we provide, but they are the people we need to make happy. Our focus is always on addressing the job seeker’s point of view, even if we’re working with employers in a consulting capacity. Recruiting is often done from the buying perspective, but we think that it should be done from the selling perspective.

What’s your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?

One Day, One Job is a proof of concept. Our successes in promoting our site and growing our audience have proved to us that there is a lot of room for improvement in how employers promote their jobs online. Not only can a job search be enjoyable for the end user, but companies can attract top quality candidates through great copywriting, search engine optimization, use of social media, and Facebook advertising.

If companies and job boards were engaging job searchers, we wouldn’t have thousands of visitors every week.

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?

We want to continue finding new ways to make online job searching easier. We have some ideas for great web applications, but we also want to expand our business in regard to helping employers. We’re not sure where we’re going, but that’s part of the fun of starting a business.

On Another Note

We’re going to steal Naomi’s idea, and do our own take on her idea with a post called What Kind of Job Are You Looking For? We’ll ask a few questions, and you can reply by leaving a comment or writing a blog post that links to our post.

Dirt Digging on Employers

You just hung up the phone. You’re sweating. Your mouth is dry. Your heart is racing. You just had your first ever phone interview. It was for an internship with a company that you’re really excited about. You don’t know what to do with your nervous energy, so you start surfing the web looking for information about the company and your interviewer. It’s like checking the answers immediately after an exam. You need affirmation that you didn’t completely blow it. You Google your interviewer’s name. You find his blog. You start reading. You see a link to his Twitter account. You click through. You see a reference to your just completed interview.

Read the full article →

We just posted our first post on the One Day, One Internship Blog. It’s called Be Someone’s Favorite Intern. It’s totally relevant to entry-level job search, so we thought we’d tell you to go over there and check it out!

Couch Potato Job Searcher

You’re watching tv with your roommates. They all have laptops, but you’re that kid who thought it was a good idea to bring a desktop to college. They are instant messaging (each other about how you never do your dishes), Youtubing, Facebooking, and Googling, all while watching tv. They’re reading online episode guides to get caught up with the series that you’re watching. When a company has a great commercial with a web address, they’ll probably type it in. What’s on tv has become a driving force in online activity. This might sound like a marketer’s wet dream, but Google Trends shows just how much what is on tv drives online search.

With that said, we thought it would be fun to see how college students can get job search ideas from watching tv. Now, leaving a permanent impression of your butt on the couch cushion while you eat Cheesy Poofs is not a legitimate job search tactic. However, if you’re going to watch the boob tube anyways, you might as well make the most of it. Here are tips on how to find jobs while watching the tv.

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For those of you who get your daily dose of One Day, One Job through RSS or e-mail, as well as those who are too dense to notice the changes we’ve made to our layout, we want to let you know that we announced the launch of One Day, One Internship this morning. It’s a whole new site, but it has the same great format as One Day, One Job. Instead of writing about entry-level jobs each day, we’re writing about internships for college students. Duh! So, if you’re a college freshman, sophomore, or junior, head over there and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any of the great companies that we profile.

You’ll notice that both One Day, One Job and One Day, One Internship feature Bliss today. Our two sites won’t always focus on the same company; however, if the company has both internships and entry-level jobs, there’s a good chance that they’ll appear on both sites on the same day.

Let us know what you think! We love to hear feedback from readers.

For most new job seekers, the candidate selection process is incredibly opaque. Although some companies offer feedback on interviews, this is usually a half-hearted collection of vague generalities. Comments such as “the applicant pool was very large,” don’t tell you anything, and positive feedback such as “you were very friendly,” tell you something that you knew already. To be quite frank, these comments simply sugarcoat the fact that you were not the candidate of choice. This doesn’t mean that you couldn’t do the job – chances are you wouldn’t have been interviewed if that was the case – but it does mean that you failed to demonstrate to your interviewers why you were the best option.

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Not Junk

Today I wanted to contact one of my old professors. My alma mater doesn’t provide alumni e-mail access, although they are considerate enough to forward our old e-mail addresses to a new account. That’s nice, but it’s not enough. If Google can offer Gmail for free, why can’t a University that just got $100k+ from me let me keep my .edu e-mail address in perpetuity? I mean, it’s not that I really want to receive e-mails at that address (which I basically can with forwarding), but that I want to be able to send from the .edu address because of its ability to dodge spam filters. I don’t spam people, but sometimes e-mail servers or mail clients might think my e-mail looks like spam.

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Spider Web

This post was written by Rob Dusel. He is a graduate of Cornell University (B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil in Land Economy). Rob currently works for an international real estate investment fund and will be an occasional contributor to One Day, One Job.

So far at One Day, One Job, Willy has provided some great advice about how to use the Internet in your job search, but sometimes the perfect job just isn’t to be found online. In fact, for a huge number of new college graduates, this turns out to be the case. One Day, One Job showcases some of the best and most interesting entry-level jobs that can be found on the web today, but quite often the cutting edge, niche firms that job seekers dream about simply don’t have the time or staff to monitor an online job posting. Without a dedicated employee to sift through resumes and answer questions, companies often end up hiring on a “we need someone today” basis. Unless you put yourself out there by cold calling, you simply won’t have a chance at getting hired in one of these situations.

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A reader e-mailed us a few weeks ago – she’s a senior at Columbia University, and she’s job searching. She’s had the usual frustrations with finding helpful information on companies’ career sites; however, her situations is exacerbated by the fact that she is an international student. Many students from abroad are treated like second class citizens (does that make sense, since they’re not US citizens?) in the job recruitment process solely because of their need for sponsorship to obtain a visa (did we get the terminology right?). Pursuing entry level jobs abroad is one alternative, but many of these students prefer to stay in the U.S. for at least a few more years.

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Despite the fact that many college kids say that they live in a bubble, they still deal with an information overload on a daily basis. Today you might read 7 Facebook messages, 23 e-mails, 142 IMs, 14 text messages, 97 pages of assigned reading, 3 course announcements, 12 web pages, 8 blog posts, and 6 articles in your campus daily. Shoot, you might do that before noon. It’s easy to deal with the information when it’s delivered to you. E-mail makes your computer ding. Facebook sends you e-mails. You have a ringtone for text messages. IMs make an icon on your screen bounce. Your campus daily is delivered in front of your favorite coffee shop every morning. It’s when you have to seek out information that it becomes far more difficult to manage.

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Better World Books LogoA few days ago we told you about jobs at Better World Books. We’d never communicated with anyone from Better World Books or their online store Better World before we wrote our post, but on the day our post was published, Dustin from Better World contacted us. He liked that our post accurately portrayed jobs at Better World Books, and he wanted to thank us by offering a coupon code for a one-time 20% discount on any purchase from Better World. Well, we were pretty excited about that, but what we really wanted was to share the discount with our readers. So, we e-mailed Dustin and asked him if we could tell you all the coupon code. He wrote back and gave us a new coupon code just for One Day, One Job readers.

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