Continental Shelf

Things are going well, but it’s a lot of work to find work! I’m getting calls and e-mails all the time, and I’ve been fielding lots of interviews. Just today, I had two; and right now I have one next Monday, two on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday morning. I think I’m doing well in interviews as well, but we’ll see the real results if I start getting offers. So far, no employer has terminated the process, although in a couple of cases I had to say early on that I didn’t think I had the right qualifications.

There are lots of neat online tools for job search these days; I’ve been very pleased with JibberJobber, the Washington Workforce Explorer, and LinkedIn; I have not fully explored Quintessential Careers, but it looks interesting. And of course I’m very fond of the Google calendar tool to track what I have to do and let my husband see it too.

Among job boards, I have posted my resume on Monster.com and on CareerBuilder. I also search Craig’s List, Indeed, JustPosted, Jobster, and Bounce Base. The Job Feed feature on JibberJobber is incredibly useful to aggregate all these, but regular RSS feed works too. There is so much traffic following the point where you upload a resume on one of the big sites that I feel it’s best to hit only one a week or every couple of weeks. Also, I have mixed feelings about their usefulness.

Monster.com has been a good first site for me, leading to lots of good solid contacts. CareerBuilder’s search interface and daily posts are much nicer: jobs are colour-coded and new postings are tagged, as are those about to expire. But CareerBuilder has also been a source of spam, both general (the usual ads for cheap meds and sexual aids) and directed (fake or dubious job postings, offer for services that play upon the unemployed’s insecurity, etc.)