LinkedIn has been adding a great deal of applications lately and my best guess is that they are trying to emulate what Facebook and the iPhone have already achieved on that front. A few of these applications are very useful for all of us but one in particular is handy for job seekers.
We already know that LinkedIn is a temple for job seekers and if the LinkedIn Corporation had its way they would probably put out every job board out of business tomorrow. So instead of being beaten, the job boards are joining up as well.
LinkedIn Jobs Insider
The brilliant little app I am talking about is the Jobs Insider tool on LinkedIn. It comes as a plugin to the LinkedIn browser toolbar, which you may have installed already. You download it to either your Explorer or Mozilla browser and it combines a number of technologies to bring you the best job search experience. The tool works with 7 major job boards at the moment: Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Craigslist, SimplyHired, Dice, and Vault.
Once you have installed Jobs Insider, your new tool will appear as a pane on your left hand side. Now do some digging around the 7 job boards and search for a few job openings relevant to your experience. LinkedIn will very cleverly indicate which contacts you are connected to at the particular company that is hiring. If you are anything like me, you will have a few connections that you couldn’t say where they are working at the moment. This tool will pick up where your memory gave up and help you.
When you get a few matches, you can go about your sleuthing activites. Contact your connections quietly and try to gather as much background information as possible. I would advise to find out exactly who the hiring manager is and why the job has come about, so that you understand what situation the manager is in. If the best person on the team got up and walked out, the manager will be very motivated to get a good replacement pronto. If it’s a planned expansion with no deadline, you know the manager will take their time and potentially drag their feet.
If you happen to be a recruiter looking for new jobs to work on, it just so happens that this tool will be very useful for you as well. Search away on jobs that you want to work on, find out what connections of yours works for that company, smile and dial.
You will find the link to the Jobs Insider listed under tools at the bottom of your LinkedIn homepage, or click here.
A couple more useful tools for job seekers
MyResume is an application that allows you to post your resume or LinkedIn profile on Facebook. Finally you can convert all those friends on Facebook in to something useful; spreading the word about your skills, experience and what a great hire you would make. The application is available here and also very simple to set up.
If you have a WordPress blog, you can now syndicate your LinkedIn profile on it and show the world your online resume. This application is called LinkedIn hResume for WordPress and it grabs the hResume microformat block from your LinkedIn public profile page allowing you to add it to any WordPress page and apply your own styles to it. The plugin is available here.
What other tools are out there that you can recommend?
