Google Alerts is a fine tool provided free by Google for monitoring your online presence. It is very useful for anyone in to Personal Branding as you get alerts sent to you as soon as you are mentioned somewhere on the Internet. Other uses for Google Alerts would be to monitor news about your company, competitors, share prices, weather warnings and so forth. One often overlooked use of this tool is to monitor employers and what new job openings they post, this little article will teach you how to do this.
Instead of having to check job boards every day, simply set up an alert for the companies you are interested in and let this tool do the rest for you. You are likely to be one of the first to see the opening and this will give you a head start. Increasingly today, roles will be filled as soon as somebody qualified applies and not when x number of candidates have been screened and taken through a full and proper HR process.
Getting started is simple, just click on the Google Alerts page and fill in the blanks. In this case we want to see all PR jobs coming out of IBM. We will choose comprehensive, which means it scours all news, blogs, web, videos and groups known to Google. You can then pick frequency, if you are a web junkie like me you will want as-it-happens. The email length can stay at 50 as IBM is a big business and you are likely to see a good few alerts from your comprehensive search as it includes job boards, social networks, blogs news and so on. The last thing is just to enter your email and let Google Alerts do its magic.
You can repeat this and set up as many alerts as you like to monitor a bunch of employers that you have zeroed in on. Consider Google Alerts an ongoing search, it is as if you would sit and run Google searches all day, every day – just imagine how much time you will save. And yes, any recruiters out there wanting to be the first on the phone to the client can most certainly take advantage of this service as well.
If you like Google Alerts, have a look at 140 Employers Tweeting Jobs direct to you as well.
Do you use Google Alerts and have you found any job openings through it? Are the alerts annoying?
