Looking For A Job Is A Full-Time Job
posted Jan 15, 2008 at 12:00:00 PM by Doug Gibson.
Looking for a job can be hard work and very time consuming! This is especially the case when you are looking for short term contract and freelance work, and being fairly selective about which opportunities you'll take. I could take a job in Washington, DC in a second, but I'd really rather not commute 2-3+ hours a day if I can help it. I've been telecommuting the past two years and had a 15 minute commute (and part-time telecommute) for three years before that.
But back to the actual topic I was meaning to discuss. Looking for work is hard work. I've been busier than ever the past few weeks and not even working (much). One of the most time consuming parts of starting a job search is posting your resume on various job sites and recruiter/staffing firms' sites. I've been talking to a lot of staffing firms (Aquent, Robert Half, TEKSystems, KForce, etc.) and most of them have their own proprietary site that you need an account on to be considered for their positions, even though I see most of their positions from job aggregator Indeed.com.
The time consuming part is that it's not just enough to upload your resume. Most of these sites then try to parse the information out into data fields, and you need to go through each of your job entries and clean this data up. I've been in the computer industry for almost 14 years now, so their are a fair number of entries there. I probably spent the better part of two or three days just getting my information in to these various online systems. Then, of course, you talk to the recruiters, and many require an interview with them before they will really consider you. This is all expected, but I was just shocked at how tedious the online process has become.
The other aspect of looking for freelance work is researching and discovering the best venues (sites) to find freelance work on in the first place.
Luckily most sites have RSS feeds now and many, such as Indeed.com, have RSS feeds for specific search results. RSS has been the real life saver once I got everything going in my job hunt. I don't know when I would find the time to visit all of the individual job boards I've responded to jobs on if I wasn't finding those postings via RSS.
