Free CRM, A perfect tool for Career Relationship Management

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software are great tools for Sales and Marketing functions. You add leads, convert leads to account & contacts, track progress using opportunities/potential and create forecasts about your sales pipeline.

You can easily tweak this to use as a free Career Management tool.

• Leads = Companies you would like to apply for
• Account = Company where you have applied
• Contacts = HR & network contacts in company
• Potential/Opportunity = Set as per stage of the recruitment process e.g 10% Resume sent, 20% HR called and asked questions, 30% HR called for aptitude test, etc.
• Some CRMs allow you to do notes, synch emails with MS-Outlook.

You can even do campaigns, bulk email specific groups, network, etc.

All you need to do is either setup your own CRM for free with SugarCRM or create an account at an online one which offers free for limited number of users e.g. Zoho CRM. since you will be the only user, this is a great option.

Another benefit is that most businesses use some CRM or another and you will already be proficient in atleast one. Knowing one you already are an asset.

SugarCRM
Zoho CRM

Top 3 Job boards Compete Data

Some interesting stats from Compete for the top 3 job boards



What Color Is Your Parachute? 2009: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers (Paperback)

Tim O'Reilly's article 'Work on stuff that matters...' is a great read

Reached an old post at Tim O'Reilly's blog titled Work on stuff that matters: First Principles from one of Aaron Wall's posts. It is strongly worth a read. A couple of great quotes in the post, the first one below

Money is like gas in the car -- you need to pay attention or you'll end up on the side of the road -- but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations! 

 The other is with reference to a poem by Rainer Maria Milke which is quoted as

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things."

Using Google to Find a Job - One Day One Job blog

I stumbled across a very detailed albeit old blog post on the One Day One Job blog titled How to Use Google to Find a Job. It is a very big post but worth reading in its entirety.

This blog has a post on one entry level job a day. They have a list of jobs posted in the past. Definitely worth subscribing to if the job profiles suit you. Also check out the career tools section containing articles, books and sites for reference.

Search - Using Omgili for your Job Search - Part 2

This topic continues from the earlier introduction to Omgili in Part 1 and aims to use it for a sample job search. As an example let us search for sales jobs in Memphis, TN

Using Omgili basic search

Enter the terms memphis sales job in the search box. Omgili stems keywords by default so it will show results containing the keyword 'jobs' as well.This search gives 2077 results.

Changing the order of the words will change the number of results, so job memphis sales gives 1862 results.

The results can also be sorted by relevance or date to get the latest results at the top. The search can also be added as an RSS feed to your favourite feed reader (Google reader, Bloglines, etc.). All these options are located on the upper right corner below the search box of the results page.

As can be seen, the results even when sorted by relevance are not very relevant. This raises the need to fine tune the search further and that means using the advanced search operators which we check out next.

Using Omgili advanced search

The Omgili advanced search helps us build more relevant queries. It helps us

• Target our search based on specific sections of the post such as the title, topic or reply.
• Eliminate results containing certain words
• Chose the forum name containing certain words
• Choose the forum by specific forum e.g. phpbb.com
• Choose the language
• Chose date ranges
• Chose sorting by relevance which is the default or date
• Choose the minimum number of replies for the post
• Choose the number of unique users involved in the discussion
• Choose the number of engaged users involved in the discussion (users who contributed atleast 100 words to the discussion)
• Disable keyword stemming which is enabled by default.

Now that we know what we have, let us use the above options to make our earlier search more specific.

• memphis and sales are required keywords
• Since some forums allow a seperate section for jobs, we can start by putting the word in title and later in topic
• We keep stemming enabled so that the keyword jobs is not missed.
• We choose the language as English
• We chose the date as last 3 months. This autofills the date range.

Using job in title gives just 2 results. Topic is better and gives 87 results. This looks a bit more relevant but still some results are for moves by high profile sports coaches. So let us put the word coach and miserable for elimination. This gives us 69 results

The 2nd discussion result is about a medical device sales job. The 8th result 'My company is hiring' looks relevant as well. But after the 1st page the results are not very relevant. Another weakness is the lack of a filter for inappropriate content.

With some practice and search refinements, we should get some relevant forums to track for jobs.

Omgili extended boolean search terms

The extended boolean search terms are basically search terms developed by the search tool to use directly in the search string. Our advanced query above looks like this in the search box.

memphis sales intopic:job -coach -miserable language:english from_date:20090109 to_date:20090409

If we select a specific word, say sales in the above we get a small menu just above the search box. It gives the option to convert the word sales to intitle:sales or boost its weightage by adding ^2 to the term as shown below

memphis sales^2 intopic:job -coach -miserable language:english from_date:20090109 to_date:20090409

Search - Track online conversations with Omgili - Part 1

This is a series covering niche search resources which job seekers can use. Today we start with a search engine called Omgili which is regularly covered at AltSearchEngines.

Introduction

Web 2.0 is all about blogs, microblogs, social media sites, social networking sites, etc. Important as these are, there is also a huge amount of information in older formats such as forums, discussion groups, shopping comparison sites and more. These Web 1.0 resources is not as well structured nor are they easily searchable.

Omgili is a niche search engine that focusses on these information resources and covers an important segment of the web. The about us page says it best

• 'Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, Forums, Discussion groups, Mailing lists, answer boards and others.'
• 'Omgili is a crawler based, vertical search engine that scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources.'

The Omgili menu

The menu shown at the top consists of the following options

1. Discussions Search - Search discussions containing search terms entered in the search box.
2. Reviews - Search reviews for specific products entered in the search box.
3. Stream - See updates on discussions as they are discovered like a Twitter search stream.
4. Buzzzz - See the top discussions happening under categories such as videos, news, topics, movies and products.
5. Google@Omgili - Get enhanced Google search results with the result urls linked to discussions mentioning those urls.
6. Q&A - See questions asked in discussions containing the search terms mentioned.
7. Health - Omgili pulls health topics from www.imedix.com using the search terms entered.
8. Directory - The various discussion forums are categorized with categories available as RSS Feeds to receive updates.
   
9. Categories - This menu gives a popup for quick selection of a particular category.

We will start by looking at the first of the menu options Omgili forum search a.k.a. Discussions Search in our next post using a job search example.

The 10 best job search groups on Linkedin

Tim Tyrell-Smith has a post on Secrets of the Job Hunt blog. He identifies the 10 best job search groups on Linkedin.

Linkedin allows a Jobs tab in groups, so that is a great resource once the relevant group as per ones need is selected