The Official Blog of Jobaloo.com

A new job search site has launched: TwitterJobSearch.com

You can now harness the power of Twitter search in your efforts to find a new job.

Mashable.com has a post listing out over 70 tools that can help job seekers get an edge in today’s market.

Here are 5 of our favorites from the list:

Elance - We’ve used this one to find freelance gigs as well as to hire people to do stuff for us.

Emurse - we reviewed this online resume service shortly after they came online.

Isabont - Use this service to manage your entire job search process.

Jobburner - A slick AJAX-y technical job search engine.

Whototalkto - A place to exchange information about work experience at a company…whether you have worked there, or want to work there.

As another example of how many great job hunting tools there are out the right now, I had never heard of CHiMBY until I got an email from them letting me know that Jobaloo was being included in their career advice search engine results.

When you’re looking for career advice, you can go to CHiMBY and search through over 250 career advice sites at once. With all the advice out there, the time was ripe for someone to go an attempt to harness as much of it all together as possible. CHIMBY tries to do just that.

In fact, you can take it for a spin right here in this post. Go ahead, put in a couple of keywords relating to your search and see what comes up!

Search the web’s greatest collection of career advice.

The site also has dozens of predefined search terms set up on all sorts of different topics to make things even easier for you.

CHiMBY is another tool that jobseekers should keep at their disposal to maximize their search efforts.

There’s a new trend online with websites that are really on-line applications. emurse is another example of a great Web 2.0 application/web site. After you sign up for your free account, you then can go in and fill out fields to create your resume. It couldn’t be any easier. In the past when creating a resume in Word, I always dreaded going in and creating the formatting and fields so that it would look just so. Here, you just fill in your information and your resume will be available in a number of different layouts. You can also upload your existing resume and have it available from anywhere. You can keep different resumes for different types of jobs.

Creating the on-line resume is just a very small part of what the service does though. Once the resume is created, you can distribute it directly from emurse. You can keep track of who you have sent it to, and when. If you email it from emurse, these are tracked for you automatically, if you send them via postal mail or fax, you can add in those yourself. You can share your resume online with those that you choose to, via a password protection. You can make your resume available in multiple formats to the recipient.

After you’ve created the resume, when you sign on after that point, on your emurse home page you also get a listing of jobs matching your skills and location, as well as stats about who has viewed your resume.

emurse appears to be a great tool for anyone involved in a job search. I plan on getting my resumes up there, even though I don’t plan on looking for a new job. I’ll at least know where they are, and be able to tweak them whenever I wish.

The recently launched site CareerDNA promises to be able to do with their website and software what you normally would require traditional offline career counseling.

From their press release:

Washington, DC - June 13, 2006 - CareerDNA (careerdna.net) announced today a new service that provides the first digital mentoring and career coaching center that will help recent college graduates get a job they will love based on their individual traits and talents. The process is based on the premise that successful careers start with loving one’s work; yet finding the right match between talents and a job can be a frustrating process with significant implications for an individual’s entire career and life’s work. Instead of trial, error and luck, CareerDNA is designed to provide scientific and psychological analysis that provides users with a strong understanding of how their unique dispositions, talents and experience can be applied to very specific career and job options.

This service is broken down into four key components:

* Self-Assessment and Validation (identify psychological type, skills etc.),
* Career Finder (which job is right for you?),
* Marketing (how to market themselves as a product), and
* Digital Coaching with Peter Weddle (valuable guidance and bi-weekly emails).

The service is $49.95 for 12 months.

A couple weeks ago we looked at Jobby as another online resource for job hunting. Today we’re going to summon the vast power of Google and harness it for job hunting purposes.

Google Base is an online, searchable database, which people can use to upload almost anything. Here’s what it looks like:

You’ll notice there in the second column to the left, right at the top of the column, there is a link to “Jobs”. It brings up a page where you set the terms of what you’re looking for in the jobs posted to Google Base.

The options listed (If you can’t squint hard enough to read that screen shot) are as follows:

Location: (within XXX miles of Zipcode)

Job Function: (Tech jobs right now)

Employer: (About 20 listed so far)

Job Industry: (20 choices here)

Job Type: (Full Time, Permanent, w-2 Contractor)

Education: (4 year college or high school)

You can also choose to get your result by most recent posting, or by relevance.

After you put in your information and search, you’re brought to a pretty neat results screen which not only lists the jobs, but also provides a map of your area with the jobs that came up highlighted and marked on the map:

Right now, there’s not a whole lot of jobs in Google Base, but it’s probably something you want to keep an eye on for the future. If companies keep adding to it, it could be a very useful took for scouting out available jobs in the area and their relation to you as far as distance. Keep checking back, and if you’re in the middle of a job hunt, why not give it a whirl, you ever know what you might come up with.

One of the things we want to do here at Jobaloo.com is to help keep you informed of the latest services and technologies out there designed to help you in the job market. Today we’re taking a look at a new site that is currently in Beta, Jobby.

The site promises that creating a profile with them “is like an online resume on steroids.” First, you sign up for a profile, and you can upload your resume to the site for storage. You’ll also want to pay attention to the “10,000 foot view” which will appear at the top of your profile and is the “at a glance” version of you that possible employers are going to see first. Then you go through and select a number of “tags” that serve as keywords to help employers and hiring managers to find you.

Here’s a screenshot looking at how you set up your profile:

You look through the tag cloud there and click on ones that apply to you. You click once on a tag, and it is placed in the “Newbie” box below, click twice and goes into the “Skilled” box, three times and you’re “Advanced”.

This was the “geek” tab, you go through a similar procedure for “Business”, “Design” and “Availability”. Once you’ve applied all the tabs that can possibly fit you, go ahead and save your profile. When you look at it, it will look like this:

Whomever is interested in you as a potential candidate can see when your resume was last uploaded, can download the resume, browse through your skill tags and contact you securely through the form. Hopefully this means no spam! For this demo, I uploaded a resume template from Microsoft with the name of “Max Benson” thus the name on the file.

The power of Jobby comes when hiring managers are looking to search for candidates. It’s pretty easy to put in exactly what they’re looking for in skills for a candidate and then search for those skills. They can filter the results by area or by any of the “tags” that we went through before.

Jobby also has more cool things in the works. They promise to soon have a wizard which will “allow companies and recruiting firms to create their very own version of Jobby.” This means that they will be able to embed a version of Jobby into their websites and allow candidates to do all of the above right on the company’s webpage. They offer this sample webpage which shows you what the wizard might be able to do for a school focused on education and experience and looking to add to their faculty.

A few last things:

• As the site is still in beta, it is important to note that “GoJobby.com is currently only serving up profiles for exactly one career type… “Web Geek”.“
• Be sure to check out the Jobby Blog for updates on the service as it develops.
• There is also a Wordpress Plugin available for Jobby which allows you to embed your Jobby Profile on your Wordpress blog

Conclusion: The site and technology is certainly very much in the Web 2.0 spirit. “Tags” are the in thing these days on the web, and Jobby allows to slap tags on yourself and personalize what tags best describe your skills and situation. If this site/service is able to take off and get wide participation from both job seekers and employers, it could be a very powerful tool for both. Initially, Jobby might find a bigger distribution through individual employers and especially recruiting firms, which would then be able to find ideal matches to fill openings.