Getting All Jobs for You From HotJobs or Monster.com - or Understanding Online Jobs Searches

Last updated: 8/28/2002; 6:05:47 AM

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Getting All Jobs for You From HotJobs or Monster.com - or Understanding Online Jobs Searches

I don't know about many of you out there, maybe I am just different, but whenever I use Monster or another job service, I then have a friend send me an even better job the next day. Its gotten so bad that I was thinking that 10+ years building search engines hadn't taught me anything. Then I looked a little more closely and this is what the problem turned out to be.

I am a 34 year old white male who has worked in high tech his entire career, predominantly in a leadership product management or engineering management role. This is the job that I want to get again (fate willing).

NOTE: I'm no longer in the job market, having (again) started my own business, but I left the above text in to set the context.

So, taking these criteria, I made up the following Monster Query:

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What this first query does is give me all jobs either Software or Internet in MA or NH. Technically this query returns too much information since I don't qualify it by adding "product manager". We'll come to this in a second.

What I found when I was using this query exclusively is that I wasn't getting certain jobs at all! Why? Because even though some of those companies were in the software or internet business, Monster doesn't know them as such. A clear categorization failure. Sigh. Grumble. Enter approach #2.

In approach #2, we drop out the industry criteria completely and then rely on "Product Manager" (with quotes). This is shown below:

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Now for the jobs that I am also looking for include "Product Marketing Manager" (since I can legitimately do this and have had this title before). This means that we'll need an approach #3 to handle that different job title.

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Now the final problem is how to make these three links so drop dead easy to use that I will actually bother to check them every single day – usually multiple times. What to do? The best approach I found was to get Monster to do the query and then drag the URL of the query onto the link toolbar. This is how I started and is shown below (the link is red for clarity):

The problem with this is what if you have a LOT OF queries. After all, there isn't just Monster, there is FlipDog and HotJobs among others. This moved me to a Favorites based approach as shown below:

I'm not done figuring out how to make the job search easier but this has helped.

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