More Electronic Resources for Landing the Best Job

After a second session with Mr. Daniel Porot on job search and career management, it has become clear that:

• best resume is no resume and CV is a curse word
• postpone salary negotiation until the recruiter is ready to pull out the torture instruments
• you are not selling, they are buying

I don't know if I am fully convinced by these approaches, but definitely they would work, perhaps, in the majority of the situations. Not if you are dealing with a professional recruiter though. That's why Porot is an ardent advocate of targeting the hidden market and approaching anyone but HR.

Some of the tools that I find particularly interesting (or at least unorthodox) in the process of job search. I do not promulgate their use - simply alerting you to their existence...

Free Mind. A mind mapper, and at the same time an easy-to-operate hierarchical editor with strong emphasis on folding. These two are not really two different things, just two different descriptions of a single application. Often used for knowledge and content mgmt. Downloadable from many sites, for instance, this one. Alternative software: NovaMind, xMind. These easy-to-use tools will help you understand better your strong points and make connections between your past work experiences, which might result in unique combinations, making you a unique professional in a particular area.

WORDLE. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Why is it useful? Simply take a couple of job ads of positions/industries you are interested in and put them into Wordle. You will get a list of key words, which should be incorporated into your CV, making it stronger and more attractive to your prospective employers. 

WebMii. An interesting toy to discover your popularity index. Use WebMii to find out how frequently you are mentioned in the world wide web. "Sergey Gorbatov" returned a pitiful 2.9 score, and I am sure you are going to do much better. WebMii will help you see if there is anything on the Internet that you are unhappy about - references, pictures, links, etc., which might raise an eyebrow or two of a recruiter who will be doing background checks on your candidacy.

123People. The idea is largely similar to WebMii, but the outcome you are getting provides more information. Log onto 123People.com and find out (sometimes surprising) facts about yourself: blog, documents, videos, pictures, links, new, IMs, microblogs and others. Be particularly careful about this one, as it captures bits and pieces of your IM conversations.

Suicide Machine. The essence of this web service is best described in an article from Time magazine:

Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.

 Happy experimenting!