JibberJobber Vision: Organize Your Job Search

I talk about organizing (and managing) your job search quite a bit… what does that mean?

In my job search I went to a weekly networking job club. The people over the club thought it would be helpful to bring the spouses in for a meeting (and a dinner) so they could come up to speed on the tactics and strategies that we were being taught. We were being told to do stuff outside of “sit on Monster and apply to jobs 10 hours a day.” Some spouses (who hadn’t been in a job search for many years) didn’t understand why we were having lunch meetings, breakfast meetings, informational interviews, networking meetings, etc.  Isn’t a job search made up of stalking the job boards and applying to jobs?

So, we had a really nice dinner, and some presentations to help the spouses understand the what and why of today’s job search. I remember one of the presenters was talking about the networking he was doing, and one of the spouses raised her hand and said “this sounds like a lot of information… how do you keep track of all of that?”

Indeed, if you are doing a strategic, purposeful, principle-based job search, you should be gathering a lot of data.  Names, numbers, companies, opportunities… You are also creating a lot of information, when you apply to an opening with a certain version of your resume, or you have conversations with someone and you learn some great information… how and where do you track that?

The amount of data that you come across, and create, in a job search, is easily overwhelming.  The more your search, the more you can forget.  A spreadsheet doesn’t really have the space or structure to store the information, nor does it have the right tools to make it easy to find important information later.

There’s a considerable difference between the power of a flat file, or a spreadsheet, and a database-driven application.  JibberJobber is the database-driven application that allows you to enter data in logical places (like Log Entries, or Company records) and easily search for conversations or contacts.

Yesterday I mentioned that recruiters and HR have access to tools like this… and JibberJobber levels the playing field. Today my emphasis is on organizing the vast amount of data and information that comes your way.  This was a considerable part of the early vision of JibberJobber, and has been a core promise that we have stuck true to through the years.