Looking for a Job is a Full Time Job

(Photo by JulyYu)

Over the course of nearly 2 years we have chatted about strategies, tips and tactics to finding jobs in the Orlando market. From job fairs to interviewing to personal branding to networking, volunteering, searching for jobs online, offline and everything else that comes with the turbulent times of looking for your next career, job or lifestyle opportunity.

The one mistake I see time and time again is that you are not working on your job hunt and personal branding like it is a full time job. When you are at a desk from 9-5 you get a great deal of things done. Why don't you treat your job search the same way?

Schedule your day
One of the best tips I can give you is to set times for specific activities throughout your day. Recruiters are usually easier to get a hold of in the morning so I would plan for phone calls from 8am - 10am. Take the mid day to search for job openings on job boards, in classifieds, papers, etc and create a lead list of job possibilities. Lastly, use the afternoon to build your personal brand, network and research the companies and the people that work there.

Set specific goals
With your schedule, set specific achievable goals that you hold yourself to. Make 5 calls to recruiters. Find 6 jobs that I would like to learn more about. Write 1 blog post. Friend 5 people on LinkedIn. Reply to 5 posts and start a conversation with the authors. Whatever the case may be, set clear goals and achieve them everyday.

Take the weekends off
If you are training yourself to work the job hunt like a job, then you also need time to refresh, reload and relax with your family. If you like to work on the weekends, then take Monday or a day in the middle of the week off. As important as it is to find your next job and get a consistent paycheck, your mind can only handle so much.

Create systems and relationships to manage your work day
Using things like RSS Readers, task managers like Remember the Milk and Google Calendar and leveraging networks like LinkedIn make your day easier to manage. Having one or 2 places to log in where you can perform many tasks and keep yourself organized will not only help you in your job hunt but also when you land the job you will be better equipped to manage your work load and perform at a higher standard.

Here's to your new job, the job of looking for a job. There are opportunities out there Orlando, it is up to you to find them and be prepared to jump on them when they do open up.

Happy hunting Orlando!

-Greg Rollett

More Branding Buzzword Talk for Job Seekers

The last few days I have been in Miami attending BarCampMiami and Future of Web Apps. While most of the 3 days focused on emerging technologies and how the web is enabling people to find information and communicate with others in ways that are beyond our imagination.

One thing that kept popping up was branding. Whether it be personal branding, company branding or empowering your employees to help build a brand, it was a theme that no one could escape. I know that we have been harping on personal brands for the past few weeks here on the Orlando JobSpot, but the importance should be on the top of your to-do list.

One of the key branding presentations turned into standing room only as Jay Berkowitz gave his 10 Rules to Personal Branding chat. Jay has worked on the brand management side of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Sprint and eDiets.com and can talk about branding from a large corporate standpoint down to that of individuals looking for a leg up in the job hunting process.

Here is a link to his 10 Rules of Personal Branding.

The other big branding presentation was from Alex Hunter, Head of Internet Marketing for Virgin. His talk focused on the shift in advertising and the conversation flow of corporations and the consumer. Brands are activley shifting from corporate advertising to crowd sourced and consumer driven marketing. Virgin is making their shift towards this movement by redesigning their site to be controlled by what the people are saying. From videos, to blog posts to other tools online - they are giving power back to the consumer.

Look for more instances of branding - both personal and corporate to come out this year, as many people and companies need to make a shift and show their true colors to stand out from their competition.

Happy hunting Orlando!

-Greg Rollett

Listening to Your Industry

When you are out of work, your industry keeps moving. From the tools to tactics to leaders and influencers, the working world never stands still. As part of our personal branding series, we are going to look at a few free ways to stay on top of your industry so when you get back in the workplace, you are in the know and can act like you never missed a beat.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to get updates via email on any keyword phrase that you want to stay on top of. Every second of every day Google is searching the Internet for new websites, pages, articles, blogs, videos, etc and when they come across something new that hits your keyword phrase they will email you so you can check it out. With Google Alerts you have the option of receiving the following types of content:

• News
• Web
• Blog
• Video
• Groups
• Comprehensive (all of the above)

The key thing to remember with Google Alerts is that the more specific your search term the more relevant results you will get. If your topic is popular, you can choose to receive updates once a week, daily or as it happens. I suggest going daily as not to flood your inbox with different articles and web pages.

LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that allows for people to connect with each other via past professional relationships. Within this service are groups. These groups can range from Orlando Restaurant Group to Youth Marketers to Sales Professionals. Joining these groups allows you to network and listen to what is going on in their businesses. Discussions on marketing, hiring, trends, etc are discussed and is a great place to learn and soak in some information.

Another area on LinkedIn that is great for industry education is the answers section. Here people can ask questions and industry pros answer them, comment and discuss how to best approach the situation. From here you can chime in, sit back and listen or ask your own questions.

AllTop

From their website, AllTop's purpose is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. What they did was create a homebase for all the hot topics in a number of industries. From the homepage click on work and you can explore all the best sites and stories from banking, consulting, branding, customer service and so much more. This is a new favorite site of mine and a great way to see what is happening now!

I hope these sites give you an edge to stay on the pulse of your industry. Just because you are out of work doesn't mean the learning should stop. Aquiring skills, education and industry knowledge could be the thing that seperates you from the crowd.

Stay tuned as we continue our personal branding series next week with a look at Blogging 101 and Reputation Managment. Happy Valentine's Day Orlando and best of luck in looking for a job.

-Greg Rollett

Personal Branding Week: Tools and Sites

As we continue along with personal branding week, we are going to discover that there are a lot of tools that you can use online to help in the creation, maintenance and promotion of your personal brand. We are going to break these down into a few categories today:

• Blog platforms
• Social Networks
• Communication Tools
• Interactive Resumes
• and E-Mail
• (we will be doing more tools and tips on Monday when we get into the listening and engagement section).

Blog Platforms
Blogs are simply websites that house your content in reverse chronological order (or your newest updates at the top and archiving older updates). Blogs have been around as we know them for about 10 years, and have been used by everyone from journalists to news sites to personal sites to the home of our new presidential administration. With millions of blogs now online, it is safe to say that they we are well past the days of blogs being considered personal diaries and being a focal point of your personal brand and a center of conversation. Here are the platforms to get started.
Blogger - Owned by Google and a great content manager. Blogger is the platform on which this blog is run and is great for beginners and people who like publishing web content with the push of a button.
Wordpress.com - This is a free blog publishing platform that has become the new standard for beginners that are looking to grow and expand in the realm of blogging. There are some limitations, but the platform itself is home to a great community and constant updates to ensure that your posts are always served and looking fantastic.
Wordpress.org - Wordpress.org is the next step in the eveolution of Wordpress. The software needs to be downloaded and then placed in to a hosting service (look at 1 and 1, we have run sites on their hosting for $1.99/mo with no issues so far). There is unlimited customization options and the sky is the limit using this crowdsourced software.
Tumblr - Tumblr is a great service for digital media professionals who want to showcase video, pictures, links and short posts. Uploading is very easy and the price point is great, free for basic usage.
TypePad - Another blogging software platform that has a free version, while many of the perks come in paid upgrades.

Social Networks
Facebook - The tech giant continues to grow with close to 450,000 new users everyday across the globe. With plenty of privacy options, status updates and newsfeeds, this service is a great place to network, look for job opportunities and utilize applications that deal in your area of expertise.
LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a professional networking service that serves professionals looking to network with each other for business opportunities, new job opportunities and recomend people for services that have been completed in favorable conditions.
Myspace - While not as heaily popular as it once was, Myspace is still a place to network with peers, customize a website and showcase your talents to the world.

Communication Tools
Twitter - Twitter is a status update platform that tells everyone in your network what you are doing in 140 characters or less. Much has been written about how people interact on the service, and has been used for everything from breaking stories about earthquakes and plane landings to product launches to sharing links and videos to lo0oking for jobs.
Meebo - Meebo is an instant messaging aggregator. If you have accounts on Yahoo Messenger, AIM, GTalk, Jabber and other accounts, Meebo allows you to utilize all of them at the same time from one window.

Interactive Resumes
Emurse - Emurse is a drag and drop resume service that hosts your resume online for you to send to prospective employers. It is very user friendly and serves as great way to update your resume as things change in your life and career.
Visual CV - An interactive and new media approach to a resume was the goal with Visual CV. With the service you can add photos, portfolio work, videos and other elements in one easy to send, easy to read online resume. Give it a try today and see how interactive your career really is!

E-Mail
GMail - Becoming the new standard in free e-mail servers, Google's GMail is a great tool for sending, receiving and sorting email. Included is GChat which is becomming a great tool in itself for people to chat and stay in touch with each other.
Hotmail, Yahoo and AOl - All 3 offer great free tools for emails. Just be sure to get a professional email address when signing up!

When you are looking for a job, there is one standard that is not yet going away anytime soon., the resume. And while this sheet of paper is bound by standards and similarities, there are some great things you can do to spruce it up with tools from you personal brand. Linking to blogs, videos, presentations and portfolio work is just the tip of the iceberg. What can you link your resume up to?

Let us know what tools you are using for your personal brand in the comments and ask any questions that you have and we will work through the community to get answers to all of your questions.

-Greg Rollett

Personal Branding Week: Niches and Domains

Today we right in the middle of personal branding week here on the Orlando JobSpot. Today we are going to take a look at choosing a niche for your personal brand and how to find domain names based on that niche and your name.

Finding your niche, or specialization, may be the most important step in creating a strong personal brand. The industry you choose to write about, talk about, network with and research will be a determining factor in how future employees see you, how you set yourself up for freelance work, personal business or internal promotions. We have broken down choosing your niche into 3 easy steps.

1. What is your dream job?
2. What about the career that you want excites you?
3. What skills, education, specialization in that career sets you apart from every other worker in that field?

Here are my answers:

1. Utilizing and teaching social media to people all over the world and getting young people excited about using technology and connecting with brands
2. I love the fact that talking about Gen-Y, youth marketing and social media excites other people and gets them motivated to use these tools in their career / business.
3. I have been blogging for over 2 years, have been featured in newspapers and books, interviewed all over the web, consult and talk to all types of companies in all different industries and I am in the demographic that I am trying to get businesses to target.

Based on these 3 questions it would make sense to brand myself as a youth social media marketer. In fact if you type in youth social media marketing on Google you will find my site sitting at #1. Pretty sweet right?

So what about you?
Is your dream job to open your own company, to work for a Fortune 500 or to be able to work remotely to have more time with your family?

What gets you fired up in your career? Is it the paycheck, the face of a satisfied customer, helping someone in need or closing a new huge account? This will help you determine the passion in your career and will spark many topics for you to explore.

What sets you apart in your industry? Have you won awards, spoken or taught a subject, or maybe you are the go-to person for a very specialized part of your job. Whatever the case is, this is your identifying trait that can help your personal brand excel among all the chatter online and off.

Domains
At this point I hope that you have thought about your niche and your industry. The next part can be both fun and challenging. Grabbing domains can be a scary task but also can be a great stepping stone to securing your personal brand.

Domain options
Most social media networks allow you to customize domains on their site for free. For example, on Myspace you get to choose a customer URL like myspace.com/myname. Free blog hosting sites like Blogger also give you a customized domain, much like the one you are on now, http://orlandojobspot.blogspot.com. The OrlandoJobSpot part is the name of this blog and helps in our branding and overall strategy. Hopefully from the title you gather that you will find information on Orlando Jobs.

If you want to take it a step further, you can buy a custom domain to host your own website, blog or portfolio. One of the more popular places to do this is with GoDaddy.com. For less than $10/yr you can have a domain that is your own and helps establish credibility for your brand.

Which ever option you choose you need to come up with a smart domain name. The best available option is yourname.com. This is much easier said than done with common names like Jim Smith. If you have a common name you will need to get clever with your domain name choice.

If this is you, you may want to look into adding some keywords into your domain name. For example, if you are Jim Smith, and work as a carpenter you may want to see if orlandocarpenter.com is available or jimsmithcarpentry.com. Both give the impression that you are going to a carpenter's site and both carry a professional brand tag with them.

For more information on choosing a niche or domain for your personal brand, check out these resources below:
Young HR Guy - domain name options
Buy your name as a domain
Personal Brand Attributes by Dan Schawbel

In the comments, please leave your nich and domain name ideas and we will chime in with any advice and tips that we have. See you tomorrow Orlando!

-Greg Rollett

Personal Branding Week at the Orlando JobSpot

2009 is the year of the personal brand. Or so many marketers and social media players would have you think. I, on the other hand, believe that in these economic times, being one step ahead of your peers and competition is vital to having a successful 2009.

Personal branding, as defined by Wikipedia,

"is the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands."

Quite simply you are promoting yourself in the industry that you wish to work or be successful in. The topic is popular among Gen-Y and students about to enter the workforce, but should not be segmented into solely this generation.

Personal branding can help anyone in any industry get ahead and create digital footprints that leads to experience, research and community. Throughout the rest of the week, we will dive into topics that relate to personal branding and how you can get involved one day at a time.

Topics we will cover include:

• Securing domain names
• Industry specialization
• Selecting platforms to use
• Listening and engagement
• Blogging 101

We will try our best to provide step-by-step instructions, links and case studies to show you the power of personal branding and the roles that new media plays, and how that reverts back to finding a job.

If you would like to get the entire series on personal branding delivered right into your inbox, I do suggest subscribing to our E-Mail Feed on the top right side of this page, under the video. That way as soon as a post goes live, it will be sent to your email, for you to read on your own time.

Happy hunting Orlando and we'll see you back tomorrow for Specialization and Domain Names.

-Greg Rollett