One that you wake up to.
It’s time to look for a new job.
And you immediately start to sweat.
Hang on there’s help a few clicks away.
Job search apps.
There are a few distinct types of job search app ever built.
In the original article I’ve included products that have met their sunsets. But for the update I had a better idea. Read about them in my definitive post about sunset job search apps.
But that seemed oversimplified. So, I’ll list the healthy apps by these categories: Preparation, Hunt, and Close
With the categories alphabetically sorted.
Links leading to app landing pages, through bitly (shortening) as I couldn’t resist to see which ones you’d like to see for yourself. If you have an issue with bitly or your privacy then simply open a new tab and search for the apps’ name in duckduckgo.com.
These are apps and resources that make you more prepared and present yourself in the best possible light in the eye of employers. Including polishing up your CV, resume, cover letter et al.
Drag and drop resume snippets to build an impressive online resume in minutes. Users love most about it:
UK-based, mobile app: iOS & Android) – Career guidance with Artificial intelligence.
They claim: “Our resumes get people hired at top companies.” Both free and for pay options to touch up your CV, cover letter. They even help you find jobs.
Their claim: instantly create a resume, cover letter with the help of algorithm.
Their key claim: “One beautiful resume that works everywhere.” People seem to like its clean design most.
These are tools & apps that make the grind less grinding. Help you with following up, finding email addresses et al.
From their website:
“Finding a job can be tough and keeping track of all those applications can be a hassle. Jobcrumb makes this procress simple for you. We provide an easy-to-use dashboard service focused on making it easy to track the status of your applications.”
From their website:
“No more messy spreadsheets. Huntr keeps track of every detail about your job opportunities regardless of where you found them. Track contacts, notes, dates, tasks, job descriptions, salaries, locations, company data and more. It’s like a CRM for your job search.”
Optimize and organize your job search on one dashboard. It is stil running but last blogpost is from 2017 and the copyright in the footer is until 2016.
A visual “job CRM” to help you be more organized and effective. On dashboard job search doesn’t work in Europe.
Organize your job search by tracking all your prospects. An even simpler version which is not a spreadsheet. But sure looks like one.
Job search app and community for startup jobs. Mostly in Europe, specifically in the Baltics.
For both iOS & Android. With their own words “Tap into the hidden job market. Anonymously. A social recruitment app for talent in tech, design and marketing.”
Explore job offers from Top-500 companies.
SmartMe Profile from Pitchme.co
It does what it says on the tin. You link up your social handles (like github et al) and presto you got a profile to share or download.
You upload your resume. Checks out the jobs available - they are based out of Silicon Valley so, mostly tech. Then the AI takes care of matching the employers with you. So you don’t need to do a lot just sit back.
Job hunting made easy with a Kanban board. Plus a handy Chrome extension.
This is the least apped up part of the job search. Read, I’ve yet to find a candidate facing tool. Essentially this is the part where you need knowledge (about industry salary levels and such), plus know-how (negotiate.)
So your best bet is looking up salaries yourself. Indeed (here’s an example search from Ireland) & Glasdoor (example) both do an ok job here. If you are lucky you may even find reviews from folk who walked the road before you.
Expect updates down the road, if you know a tool, app, extension or webapp. Please hit me up if you know of another web tool or mobile app that helps with the demanding project of job search.
Peace.
Still lost? Here’s my framework for a job search.
Else just let me know where did I go wrong here or did I forget anything.
Originally conjured this up as a part of a series where I’ll dissect each phase and each channel to find where the breaks, friction points are, while I wanted to build somekind of tool to help soothe and oil the whole process.
]]>Might be as easy as saying yes to a recruiter contacting you on LinkedIn.
Or as hard and pressing as having anxiety attacks every morning right after you wake up.
Hold on.
In a hurry? Looking jost for a job search app? You’re covered.
Oh, got time.
Let’s dive in then.
I’ve already tried to put some structure into the job search.
Back then I’ve stopped at the more direct ones avoiding Recruiters.
I’m still no big fan of recruiters though I come to see them in a different shade now.
Now, building an app for manager level HR people brought the dilemma of how one finds a job up. So, these are the two main questions:
“What ways can you find jobs?
And how these ways relate to one another?”
I was planning for a nerdy and wordy way to present the matrix. Then figured you’d rather want to see the matrix for yourself first.
The pieces.
I boiled down the whole search into three phases:
a) take it
b) haggle
c) return with a polite “My ar$e!”
While for the traction channels - yes it’s a startup term, read about it up and get obsessed:
If you are a HR manager based in Europe (or aspiring to be) and have looked for a job in the field before you may want to go straight to the early access survey to get involved.
Else just let me know where did I go wrong here or did I forget anything.
This will be a series where I’ll dissect each phase and each channel to find where the breaks, friction points are, while I build the tool to help soothe and oil the whole process.
]]>Have toyed with the idea. First I wanted to find an easy to hack example. Found a great pen with my favorite vue.js. Then I made the mistake of being unagnostic towards boostrap as a CSS. Trying to push bulma CSS. Only to realize a couple of days later that it doesn’t matter. So I went back to the pen. Then I got stuck with the codepen hacking workflow. So exported the whole code in zip. Spun up my local dev server (jekyll serve –watch). The last obstacle was that I couldn’t figure out how to
Yes, you’re right this is more like a low-code as I had to touch things in the HTML. No, you probably shall not do this if you need a low-fi, no-code biolinks page. My best bet would rather be extensions based (see P.S. further down). But this excercise helped me realized how easily you can stitch things together. (Save the DNS point thingy. Still not tackled after a month, even though I haven’t even looked.)
I realized this is after all more of a low-code solution but way after pushing the publish button – git based deployment of my jekyll blog to netlfy :) So, I’m still here mopping up, as a regular newby should.
Here are the ingredients for a bonafide no-code biolink:
How?
“The introduction of the first microcomputers in the mid-1970s was the start of explosive growth for BASIC. It had the advantage that it was fairly well known to the young designers and computer hobbyists who took an interest in microcomputers.
BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level enough to be usable by those without training and small enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day, making it the de facto standard programming language on early microcomputers.”
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
Do you see the parallel with low-code, no-code in here?
In testing your product/startup ideas speed is a key element in traction.
So, even if you’re proficient in coding it makes sense to put out the first version(s) without writing code.
This will also let you concentrate more ont he customer discovery and let your users tell you what needs to be built.
On the flip side, if your product idea flops.
No problem.
Just move on to the next idea.
Join us every Tuesday for a good chat between 1 and 2 P.M. (New York time) EDT. UPDATE: taking time building my own sh$t for at least till the end of Summer 2019 so probably better off tweeting at me on my @sugardayfox for now.
Peace out,
Dez
]]>Sharks can’t survive without swimming.
Growth equals swimming in business today.
Also, growth means:
What if I told you that you could increase your business with 100 new clients in the next 52 weeks? Now DeZsoa has an opportunity for qualified practices looking to grow with our time-tested lead generation and conversion model.
It’s faster, simpler and more effective than anything else on the market.
And allows you to build on sustainable growth through acquiring and qualifying prospects.
But that’s not all.
We’ll help you convert more of those prospects polishing every step in your digital marketing funnel.
We are looking for a few legal & dental practices each month with teams ready to take on such a challenge.
]]>Me: “Hi Pascal, it’s Dez.”
Then after the small talk, Pascal hit me with a simple line: “How can you help me? With more paying customers.”
I replied: “Look, I’ll figure out what I can do for you and get back.”
I felt dumbfounded.
At least for a day. No time to read? Skip to the video now
I always looked at web pages with a keen eye, friends’ or acquaintances’ web pages even more so.
I remember falling in love with the music of Richie Kotzen then getting a shock when checking his website - http://www.richiekotzen.com.
I see the enormous squeeze on small and medium businesses these days,
Coming from Google, Facebook - see algorithm changes, and stealing the attention span of people. Digital marketing - above all, online - is at the heart of everything we do.
It’s the easiest way to create new and relevant content. A win for both the website owner and me.
If I get the business onboard, it can serve as the basis for a case study and the framework of the actual consulting job. Again a double win
Gods and goddesses of rock. Based on my childhood aspirations.
Local businesses. Living 2 years in Ireland without roots and connections in my new home country is not sane.
International Moving businesses. I have a project idea with a loose hypothesis for the first phase of the international movers’ customer journey and I need to know more of both sides of the job. After two decades in the industry.
Thank you so much for reading this far and watching the video.
Would love to see a specific website or business teardown by me?
Send me a line on my contact page.
Ping me the usual FB messenger / Twitter DM way.
You know the drill ;) comment on the youtube video.
After a week of work, work, work.
A major content push.
And nursing my kids and wife.
They brought the illness home.
Which is ok. What’s not fine is to realize the major content push I’m in is pointless.
No data to back up what could work.
I set vague goals before and they didn’t work.
So I wasn’t surprised.
The article that helped me to refocus is Neil Patel’s short vs long content post.
Here’s the punch-line that helped me most:
you shouldn’t sacrifice quality just because it’s Monday and your content calendar says that you must publish a blog post every Monday.
Another learning point from the article was.
However great the piece of content is.
It won’t work unless it helps a real problem of a potential user.
And then my wife asked me this, after listening to yet another half an hour monologue: “Hun, why are you so irritated that you don’t know what they want? Why don’t you ask them?”
I replied: “Okay then.”
Then I slashed my forced content calendar.
And wrote this post instead.
I realized how high a chair I sat on.
How could I know what you need?
Without asking you, my dear reader, this question:
What’s the most annoying problem in your business, that keeps you up through the nights?
Two ways to answer:
After my wife realized it’s not a cheap item.
The question sprang up.
Can we make money out of it.
In a charity auction?
We considered giving the whole sum to the charity.
But I lost the retainer part of my revenues this month.
My wife needs a laptop.
While we still must push our boundaries to make the Irish dream sustainable.
So we set our eyes on a split pot charity auction.
First idea was ebay.ie.
Problem.
You can only donate to UK charities.
And we wanted to keep it local.
The next candidate was CharityAuctionsToday.com.
An American site.
Legit with no negative ratings at BBB.
Yet its background was too complex.
WHOIS registration showing a private.
Tom Kelly with a yahoo email address.
Then a TKelly Entreprise Inc. shows up in the paper trail.
That’s went down.
Ok I do not see thousands of EUR from our first ever charity auction.
Still.
The next search iteration brought me to the Irish bid2share.com.
The bad news:
It’s dead.
No live auctions going.
And it would let you donate to set charities.
Found a few big list articles.
Filled with US charity auction platforms.
But they are too commercial.
Ahem paying only.
Or too limited to my taste.
Then my love kept asking me: “Why don’t we put up a gofundme campaign, hun?”
I replied: “Why, I check it out.”
Sure many charitable causes gets funded on these platforms.
Yet I knew our cause lacks the focus needed for a successful campaign.
I stumbled on youcaring.com.
Better suited than gofundme for charity causes.
At the end I couldn’t sell myself to run a fundraising campaign.
That is a charity auction in fact.
After an extra hour of desktop research.
I fell on jumblebee.co.uk.
That got the look.
And smell of the solution.
So I gave it a go.
Did I forget any platform?
]]>I had to take a pee.
But my son slept in my lap.
So I had to wake him.
Got him in the rear seat.
I craved warmth.
But the sunrise was an hour away. The dawn of March 8, 2016.
Not the ideal start to an international women’s day.
I made my Qigong routine.
Then sat in to listen to the snoring of my kids and wife.
Last night when we left Galway.
And our short-term home behind us.
I didn’t have the nerve to call our only other housing contact.
We drove there with a vague plan.
And a great deal of hope.
The morning brought relief then.
And a home for weeks.
My business picked up again mid month.
Then a year and a half later.
Things slid again.
Lost the biggest retainer contract in my business.
Landlord played his old issues, fresh angle trump cards.
Right after school’s in.
We decided.
And went back West.
This time to Clare.
Long-term housing is but a dream.
And it feels strange to split with a charity.
Yet we’re going ahead with the auction planning.
First, I can’t let our Irish story end sour.
There’s no plan B.
So, we need more cash to sustain the follow up.
Second, I consulted with a local mentor of mine.
And learnt that it’s ok.
For the fundraiser to get their share.
Third, I have so much on my plate now that I must put skin in the game.
Else I risk procrastination knocking me out.
Have you ever run an online charity auction?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
]]>Made the website pleasing enough.
Did not forget the golden rule of lean start-up.
That if the website is not embarrassing than you over-polished it. It was a relative breeze with a static stack.
No database or complicated hosting environment involved.
Yet I couldn’t sneak around the big question:
To let them comment or not.
I’ve been here before.
Back then I boiled it down to two practical solutions.
Disqus.
And Facebook.
I start with the lesser evil.
Disqus lives off of your readers data.
What Facebook does the same?
My wife came to the rescue when she asked: “So, do you need commenting at all, hun?”
I replied: “I love you for this question luv.”
Then spiraled into yet another desktop research.
With this brief statement as a result:
It’s up to you.
I feel you burn for my reasons not to allow commenting.
I am still looking for the data to support this point.
Till I find the data read about this survey commissioned none other than Craig Newmark, Craigslist’s founder about the social media inflicted trolling.
Drawing a straight line from reason number one.
You got comment pinging at your inbox.
You open the email.
Click the link.
Read the comment.
How much more complicated it can get?
I bet you can better use your precious time.
Examples of simplified blogs with no commenting:
OK I hear your response.
Those fellas are beacons.
And I can introduce better tools to handle spam comments et al.
Ali Luke came up with three points on Problogger to help the average Joe with handling comments.
Yet the solutions offered are wordpress based.
And they don’t fear mentioning Disqus and Facebook as solutions to handle comments.
Anyway I bend it this sucks on your time and decision power.
The best way I’ve seen this put is by Everett Bogue.
So, I recap the three types are.
Then he expands that the interesting 2
Already has their own blogs.
Or end up having one.
So if they care to comment.
They can write a blog post in reply.
Social media sharing is another form within the same theme.
Medium nails commenting.
And a load of other things.
I hope they’ll survive and thrive.
But as any platforms it has its own caveats.
And by definition it’s not owned media by a long shot.
So, we have to resort to math.
There is no correlation found.
Between commenting.
And traffic.
Leave alone conversion.
You needn’t take my word.
Read this piece from optinmonster.com.
I am not saying you shouldn’t let people comment on your brilliant blog post.
But it makes sense to make that basic trade off analysis.
And make the call wisely.
Ok, if your don’t have your place to write up a nice post in reply.
]]>