Every once in a while I get emails from users that really make my day month year. Here’s one I got a couple of weeks ago – I am sharing this in its entirety because there is a lot of good stuff in here. This comes from John Greegan, who first reached out to me to tell me we had a typo somewhere. He starts off answering my question “how did you come across JibberJobber?”
A google search, mainly. A college professor who taught job search skills to those about to graduate mentioned to me that job hunting today is not the same as it was the last time I found myself in the job market in the mid 80’s. “One of the things that is different today”, he said, “is the level of organization and effort often required in a successful job search, and there are several web-based tools available to meet that demand.” Though he didn’t mention any tools by name, he did say that a good search with the keywords “Organize Job Search” would help. This, and my previous experience as an open-source software user, was the catalyst that sent me to the web.
However, my first stop on the web wasn’t google. It was sourceforge.net [note from Jason: anyone who goes to sourceforge.net for a solution is serious!], where I’ve had a lot of luck finding tools I needed at my previous job. Not finding enough there, I then turned to google. That search returned lots of articles of advice, mainly centered around buying thinks like a Franklin Planner, handwriting in your company and job info, ranking, etc…all still hand-work. JibberJobber, Virtual Job Coach, JobFiler, HappyJobSearch and Becomed [note from Jason: I think this is the first time I have mentioned any of my competitors on this blog :p] were the tools that I spent a day teasing out of various drill-downs from that list. JibberJobber was topmost on the top-level list.
Wanting to ensure that I used the best tool I could find, I spent the next day researching and comparing these four and found JibberJobber to be the most robust and sensible tool.
Did John just say JibberJobber is the most robust and sensible tool? Considering his very technical background, I’m flattered!
He goes on to say, in another email:
While we’re at it, I’d like to take a moment to tell you how happy I am with JibberJobber. Like so many others, I’ve been collecting companies I want to track on a spreadsheet or in a file folder. I thought I had a list of about 35 or so, but when I did all the initial data entry using JibberJobber I found that I had actually compiled a list closer to 70! I felt very good about my job search when I looked at the company panel at the end of that day! Tomorrow I’m meeting with the folks at the Career Center (an offshoot of the State of MN workforce center), and when I demo this for them (they want to see how I’ve organized my career management/job search thus far, and that just happens to be on JibberJobber), I have no doubt they’re going to be impressed.
Now, I normally don’t talk about WHO upgrades to premium, but I really liked what he said below (in the bold):
I’m going to upgrade my account to Premium in the next few days. With 70 companies in my list I’m nearing the limit (and I expect to exceed that limit), and since this is the most important activity I’m engaged in at the moment [note from Jason: LOVE this. Organizing your job search is NOT trivial… it really is quite important, and John recognizes it as “the most important activity” he’s engaged in] it only makes sense to spend the $9.95/mo and get the best and most efficient use of the product.
Pretty awesome, eh? John gets it, and I am so glad to hear that a college professor gave him that advice! My faith is getting restored in college professors (remember this post?)!