Sunday, March 1, 2009

Help prospective employers find you

How do recruiters find you? Primarily through your online presence. Here are some tips from a recruiter for making yourself more visible on the Web.

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Kelly Dingee, a recruiter, posted an article on fistfuloftalent.com that offers great suggestions for getting yourself out there to recruiters and potential employers. Here are some of her tips:

1. Post your resume on more than one site and then create a free gmail account for managing your job search and/or networking and to cut down on the spam you are sure to receive.

2. Build profiles on LinkedIn, Naymz, Plaxo, etc. Dingee suggests making your profiles public because many employers don’t pay to use II’s recruiter module, opting instead for free techniques like XRay to find people. If you use MySpace and Facebook, be careful that you don’t post inappropriate stuff.

3. Put yourself out there (online) with Pipl.com. Dingee says that Pipl, a people search engine, is so good that it will “probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to legally drudge up.” The word-of-mouth on Pipl is so good that it leads in the U.S. with 557K unique users. That’s compared to Spock’s 260K. Pipl produces not only links to all of your profiles on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, but it includes blog mentions and photos on Flickr. Be forewarned that it also finds mentions of your name in public records. This would not be a problem unless, as it was in my case, your name is shared by an inmate at the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Pipl also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about a person. It does this by crawling the “Deep Web.” According to Roi Carthy of TechCrunch, a general purpose search engine typically crawls the Web by following links to URLs found in other pages. By contrast, the Deep Web is made up of pages that no other pages link to. Dynamic pages are a good example of these sorts of pages. This means that if an engine wants to index pages located in Deep Web repositories it has to “guess” possible URLs. Just how big is the Deep Web? No one really knows, but it’s generally accepted that it is vastly greater (orders of magnitude greater) than the Surface Web–the pages which are easily indexed by search engines.

4. Try LookupPage, a free online service that lets you create a personal webpage that aims at representing you professionally online and is visible to all search engines.

Original Article - http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=542

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