Finding jobs and being found for jobs

By Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Reprinted with permission from Internet Search Advantage, ZD Journals. http://www.zdjournals.com

How to translate this article into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or GermanComment traduire en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles, Come tradurre in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man in Deutschen übersetzt.

The Internet is more than just an eletronic mega-library. It's a way of connecting people. Not only is AltaVista Search important for finding nuggets of information, but it also helps people find, and be found, by one another. AltaVista Search can be especially useful in job searches. Recruiters and headhunters who have positions to fill want to find qualified and interested applicants and, at the same time, want to be found by those applicants. Meanwhile, job seekers want to find openings that match their skills and aspirations and want to be found by recruiters and headhunters who have such positions. Both sets of people can benefit from using AltaVista Search and from posting their information on the Web in a way that maximizes their prospects.

Why AltaVista Search?

If you're looking for jobs or job applicants, your first thought might be to go to a Web site devoted to jobs. But, according to Electronic Recruiting News, there are already more than 3,500 job-related Web sites, and the numbers are growing rapidly. Your dilemma is probably heightened by the following questions: Where do I start? How many of these sites do I visit? And which ones do I think are most likely to get me the results I want? If you think AltaVista Search might help you look through all the sites at once, you'll have no such luck. In fact, job-related Web sites typically use databases to store their information, even when that information is just text-based, like resumes and job postings. To get to that information, you must learn the procedures and the query language of each site, fill in forms, and enter query after query. Because that information is locked up in databases rather than presented on plain Web pages, it's inaccessible by Web crawlers; hence, AltaVista Search and other search engines never index the information. Yet, AltaVista Search is still useful when it comes to finding jobs.

Actually, I discovered the job-matching power of AltaVista Search by accident. My wife was recently looking for a job. Newspaper ads and job-focused Web sites got her nowhere. Then she got a call from a headhunter whose AltaVista search found her resume at our little Web site. Within a couple of weeks, my wife had the job--thanks to a plain-text resume posted in free Web space that we get with our Internet-access account.

Actually, it would be far easier for head-hunters to use AltaVista Search to find the people they want rather than go to job site after job site and cope with all the different formats and search procedures at each site. Today, there are more than 300,000 resumes posted on the Web as plain HTML documents and indexed by AltaVista Search. That means anyone in the world who uses AltaVista Search to look for someone with certain credentials and skills is likely to find useful matches very quickly.

Finding job candidates and resumes

If you're a recruiter or a headhunter, there are several ways you can use AltaVista Search to find job candidates, depending on your needs and your personal style. First, go to the Simple Search page and enter resume. When you click the Submit button, AltaVista Search will return 900,000 matches. Some are resumes, some resume-preparation services, and some just random pages on which the word resume happens to appear (including pages soliciting job applicants and asking them to submit their resumes.) Next, click on one of the LiveTopics links (Way-Cool Topics Map, Tables, or Text-Only if your browser doesn't support Java). You'll see the top 20 categories of pages where the word resume appears, together with many subcategories. As you can see in Figure A, you can scan the lists and select or unselect miscellaneous subcategories to try to focus on what you're looking for. For instance, you can focus on engineer, analyst, consultant, or pascal as a common term that you definitely want to appear in the resumes you'll look at.

Figure A



LiveTopics will offer you several topics to help you refine your search.

Having made those preliminary choices, resubmit your query; then try LiveTopics again to see the next level of categories and subcategories. Continue to refine your search, letting LiveTopics prompt you and guide your search through the maze until you arrive at a manageable number of matches. Then begin to look at the Web pages themselves.

If you prefer, you can go straight to the Advanced Search page and enter resume in the Selection Criteria field. In the Results Ranking Criteria field, enter all the words that are relevant to the experience and qualifications you're looking for.

For instance, if I needed to hire a Webmaster, I would enter the words webmaster html perl java in the Results Ranking Criteria field. And if I wanted someone local who wouldn't have to relocate, I would add the words massachusetts ma mass for all the variants of the state name.

In this case, I get 80,000 matches. But the ones that have all or most of the ranking terms I selected will appear at the top of the list. So I don't worry about the number of matches. Rather, I scan the descriptions in the list, which helps me do a quick rough sort between pages with real resumes of job seekers and pages advertising jobs of the very kind I'm trying to fill. I check the likely Web pages starting from the top. And if I'm not seeing exactly what I want, I fine-tune my search by adding to or subtracting from the words in the Results Ranking Criteria field and resubmitting the search.

Finding job openings

If you're looking for a new job, you follow a procedure similar to the one I described for finding job candidates. You can use several approaches to produce valuable results. Perhaps you want to get an overview of the jobs that are open and the credentials that employers are looking for. In this case, you don't want to start with a job title or category. That could be too limiting and could prevent you from seeing the very opportunity that would be perfect for you.

As I noted above, to search for applicants, I'd go straight to the Advanced Search page and try to find the resumes that match my criteria. By contrast, to search for a job for myself, I'd cast a very wide net to find information. I'd try to avoid guessing what kinds of jobs are available and which ones might be good for me. I'd take my time and make full use of LiveTopics to get a broad view of the market and gradually narrow my search, learning all I could about the jobs marketplace in the process.

I'd start with a simple search and enter job career, which yields about a million matches. Many of these are for pages devoted to job- and career-related services and resources--information I expect to find at this stage. I may very well want to explore these matches or maybe even refine my search to get those and only those as matches; then I might look for the jobs themselves only after I feel sufficiently well-informed.

Next, I'd go to LiveTopics. There, I might want to focus on one of the top 20 categories--for instance, internships (if I were in college and looking for summer or term-time employment). Or I might know very well what I want to do. In that case, I'd go to the Advanced Search page and enter all the relevant terms. For instance, I'm primarily a writer and want to be involved in writing about the Internet. Also, I think of myself as an "Internet evangelist," and I'm particularly interested in companies that are savvy enough to use that term in a job posting. In that case, I'll enter job OR career in the Selection Criteria field. In the Results Ranking Criteria field, I'll enter writ* internet evangelist.

As you can see in Figure B, this search yields 2,000 matches, most of which are pages that use the word evangelist in the sense of someone who enthusiastically embraces new technology and helps spread the word about the Internet and potential jobs in this field (rather than the religious sense of the term).

Keep in mind that the vast majority of jobs posted on Web pages today are technical. And, of course, there's no guarantee that what's out there will meet your very particular needs. But the demographics of Web users and the variety and range of companies that actively use the Web are both changing rapidly; so visit the Web periodically and check to see if what's out there suits you.

If you have a clear idea of what you're looking for and have constructed a well-targeted search that should take you to only those openings you'd be interested in, but you still haven't found the job you want, bookmark your search results. Then periodically click on that bookmark to connect to AltaVista Search, launch the same search, and get updated re-sults. If you're using an advanced search, you can also enter a start date and an end date (under the Results Ranking Criteria field) to see just the matches you haven't seen before. (Actually, you only need to enter the start date. The default end date is the current date.)

Posting "findable" resumes and job openings

Being found by the right job applicants or recruiters is even better than finding them. You have a significant advantage. You don't have to get their attention--you already have it. To increase the likelihood of that happening, take note of the following suggestions: Create a Web page that clearly states the most important facts about yourself and that inserts the most important "fact" words in the HTML title and the first few lines of text. Put yourself in the shoes of the ideal person from whom you want contact and make sure you use words that such a person will be likely to search for. Don't do anything fancy. AltaVista Search indexes plain text. Graphics are irrelevant to being found. As we noted earlier, AltaVista Search doesn't index its databases, so don't put your job postings in a database. Also, don't put important information in a frame, since AltaVista Search doesn't index information inside frames. In addition, AltaVista Search doesn't index pages that require you to register or pages that you can get to only by filling out a form. Keep your job-related pages simple, and you'll be in great shape. Lastly, go to the bottom of the AltaVista Search home page and click on ADD URL. Enter the URL for each new page you create (one at a time). When you do, your information should be in the index by the next day.

As you try these techniques, please let us know about your successes and your frustrations. Send us your tips, the creative approaches you've tried, and your questions. You can reach Richard Seltzer at seltzer@samizdat.com.

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