Finding A Job#17:
Consider Broadcast Faxing

January 29, 1998 You should be lucky enough to live in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Online Job Hunter. Along with clever job hunting advice, the site offers a great service called JobFinder. Using a predefined list of over 700 hiring firms and recruiting managers, you can broadcast your resume directly for a modest fee.

Although there's a labor shortage, finding the right intersection of opportunity and timing can still be a challenge. Using contemporary technology to broadly target your audience is a tactic worth considering.

Larger companies stuff incoming resumes into large databases. We think that it's useful to imagine that these databases have large holes where your resume should be. Broadcast faxing helps you rapidly fill those empty spots.

If you don't live in Philadelphia, all is not lost. The "homework" is somewhat more time consuming, however. You'll need three things: Yahoo (again), a word processor and fax software (we use WinFaxPro, Windows '95 comes with Microsoft fax already installed). If you have a contact manager (like Act!) or a small database, so much the better.

Go to the Yahoo page for your region (the nearest metropolitan area is what you're looking for). Once you've settled into the right page, bookmark it. Click on the "Companies" section. This will take you to a listing of many of the companies in your neighborhood.

Here's the tough part. You'll need to visit each of the websites that sound like useful targets. From each site, you need to extract a contact name, mailing address, phone number, fax number and email address. You can organize them in a database or save them in a word processing file. (If you're going to use a word processor, each piece of information needs to be separated by a tab). Then, import this file into your fax software's phone book.

Open your resume, print it to the fax software, list all of your new contacts as destinations and press the button. Allow about five minutes for each fax.

With this effort accomplished, you should be able to comfortably assume that your resume is on file in the right places. It may not make the phone ring immediately. It will enable you to comfortably assure your contacts that "the company has a copy of your resume".

Finding A Job#17:
Internet Job Plan II

January 27, 1998 With your Yahoo! personal page set up (see yesterday), it's time to put some meat on the bones of your plan.

Using the Internet to research opportunities requires a fair amount of discipline. If you've spent much time online, you'll be aware of the tendency to end up looking at penguins when you started to look for pencils. It's a characteristic of the web. The technology is designed to embed distractions.

Grab a piece of paper. (yes, paper). In no more than one page, list the niches that you've captured on Yahoo. Set yourself several targets for the level of research you'll do. Use the following steps.

• Step 1. Whittle the companies contained on the list to about 15.
• Step 2. Take one hour (per website, no more) to familiarize yourself with the companies' websites.
• Step 3. For each site, go to HotBot and search for links to this URL (using each company's URL). This is likely to show you the full range of job listings.
• Step 4. Reduce your list of companies to 5 or 6.
• Step 6. Gather contact information for each company. Begin with the corporate address and work to include contacts around the company.

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