24 Free iPhone Apps for Job Hunting

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If you’re looking for a new job, I’ve rounded up some useful iPhone apps that can help you with your search and preparation for interviews. Here are 24 free apps to get your job hunt moving in the right direction.

asapLocal displays many different types of information specific to your location, including job openings.

Career Bliss provides inside information about companies, including salaries.

HireSyndicate shares real-time job info from recruiters.

CLBFree provides mobile access to Craigslist, including the job section.

BusyBee finds freelance and contract opportunities in your local area.

JobTweet Job Search utilizes Twitter for search for open positions online.

JobRadio.FM is a 24/7 Internet radio show dedicated to careers advice.

InterviewBuddy offers a slew of advice, tips and tricks for interview preparation.

GetApps Done is a little different than the other apps in this roundup. It caters to the development community, connecting those who are looking for development work and those looking for developers.

Interview Buzz Lite is another interview preparation study app with 32 free questions. The Pro version includes 300 questions.

A Mighty River specializes in assisting African-Americans with finding new job opportunities and goes beyond that with career guidance.

CBT Nuggets lets you watch many free IT training videos to help you sharpen your skills.

JobServe Connect is the official iPhone app for the service that’s been around since 1993.

UK Jobs is useful for finding jobs in the UK, not just for those living there but also for those thinking about moving across the pond.

Job Search provides a bunch of videos with advice on how to find the right job for you.

techVenture Job is from a Silicon Valley search firm that connects investors, developers and co-founders.

JobFinder serves the U.S. and UK with a powerful search engine that taps into some large job sites such as Monster.com and Indeed.com.

LinkUp Job Search Engine is different from the other apps here, in that it only lists jobs from company web sites.

TechCareers searches the niche markets for tech and engineering jobs.

SnagaJob uses your iPhone’s GPS to locate jobs within a five mile radius of where you’re standing. It also uses zipcode searches to locate positions anywhere else.

JobCompass is another job search app that utilizes the power of the GPS and displays available jobs surrounding your current position. This comes in handy when traveling to a new town or even while you’re on your way to a job interview. You just might find other positions while en route!

CareerBuilder taps into its massive 2-million job database and provides notification of any replies to job applications you’ve made on its system and new positions that become available.

High Paying Jobs claims to search more job sites than any other free job app.

ALB Legal Jobs caters to finding positions in the legal sector.

Which apps have you found useful in your job hunt?

8 Top Twitter Track Tools to Organize the People You Follow

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The proliferation of tools created to support Twitter is astounding due to the early adoption and usage of the Twitter API by developers worldwide. While there are plenty of web applications to choose from to analyze and visualize your activity with Twitter, the Twitter tracking apps that help you manage all of your friends and followers with ease are indispensable.

Here’s a rundown of eight of the best Twitter tracking apps to help you keep track of your friends and followers, and decide among them who are adding value to your usage of one of the world’s most popular social networking tools.

TwitterKarma

While it may not win awards for its aesthetics, Twitter Karma makes up for its simple design by providing a quick solution to see all of your friends and followers sorted in a variety of ways. You can follow and unfollow quickly and easily among your friends, followers, and mutual friends.

FriendOrFollow

Another Twitter tracking app for a simple sorted visualization of your friends and followers is FriendOrFollow. It’s a fast way to find all of the people you follow who aren’t following you back. If you’re curious, you can also see who the top 100 most followed users are, or the top 100 users following the most other users.

ReFollow

For someone who wants even more control over their Twitter account, ReFollow provides a slew of features for any power user. You can view not only your friends and followers, but those who are friends or followers of any other particular user, or any user who has ever @mentioned you. These can all be sorted by last tweet, tweet count, alphabetical by username, or their friend/follower counts. There’s also a ton of filterable options if you need to get very specific. You can show only users with unique keywords in their bios, their geographic locations, or even if they have a custom avatar or not.

Twittangle

For people who like to manually label their friends and followers to get a better handle on who’s who, Twittangle allows users to form groups to better manage who they follow, or who’s following them. It also displays your friends and followers with a unique column view. You can rate them, add and apply tags to each of them, add them to unique groups, or see other users’ groups.

Tweepler

To best sort your followers, Tweepler takes a different, visual approach by presenting two “bucket” columns that you “process” your followers into. This allows you to assign certain followers into an ignore state that you don’t wish to follow back. You also have many sorting and searching options to help determine who gets dropped into each “bucket”.

Twitterless

Are you looking for more statistics and visualized graphs to help you sort out your friends and followers? Twitterless will graph your follower history over time and inform you of the users that stop following you. You can filter your friends and followers with keywords, words in their descriptions, or their location in relation to you. Twitterless also has a notion of forming groups to help you better organize your network.

Tweepi

For the geekiest Twitter users, Tweepi delivers a mathematical breakdown to help you decide if you have spammers or deadbeats among your friends and followers that you need to purge. The four modules Tweepi showcases are a Follow, Flush, Reciprocate, and Cleanup – all of which help to manage your network quickly and with plenty of numerical detail to help you make your tougher decisions.

Twerpscan

The last Twitter tracking app in the roundup is self-dubbed “anti-fool contact management”, which serves as a concise description of yet another visual solution which assists you in listing and sorting your network of friends and followers. The “Drilldown” feature allows you to research more about users, while the management tools present lists with ratios, tweet counts, and other info to decide who stays and goes.

All of the above tools are good choices for doing a better job of managing your network than what Twitter.com provides. It’s really a matter of how much control you’d like, and how quickly and easily you want to make changes. There’s plenty of ways to look at the users on your lists, and these 8 web apps can provide simple solutions, detailed analysis, or fine-tuned management solutions that help improve your experience with Twitter, and get more out of the service by narrowing the amount of people you stay in contact with to only those that matter most – for you.

Keep Twitter from Overtaking Your Personal Site in Search Results with a Line of HTML [Online Identity]

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Recently, a lot of folks have noticed their Twitter pages superseding their blogs in Google search results for their name. Tech journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick has an easy HTML workaround to keep Twitter from becoming your primary online identity.

Having a say in what Google says about you is extremely important these days, especially for professionals such as freelancers, for whom a Google search result of their name is a first impression for potential employers. You definitely want your blog or professional web site to show up before your non-professional social networking profiles. Kirkpatrick discovered a small HTML tag that was missing from his own blog, yet present in Twitter, that could make all the difference:

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel='me' to a relevant link on your blog. I've added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that's a good page for me. It's as simple as making the link text read a href='http://marshallk.com/feedback' rel='me'.

It's not necessarily a foolproof solution, but it should help (and certainly shouldn't hurt). If you've got any other useful tips to keep your blog or personal site at the top of search engines, let us know in the comments.

Add One Line To Your Blog or Twitter Could Become Your Primary Identity [Marshall Kirkpatrick]

When You Network, Use Your Ears, Then Shake Hands

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Image by NixieMichelle
I was sitting at a meeting the other day, when a gentleman started to ask a very long question. The woman sitting next to me had started a networking company, and about mid-way through his question, she leaned over and said, “You should be sure to introduce yourself to this guy - he’s passionate about the same things you are.”
The funny thing was, I had completely tuned him out because the question was so long. Meanwhile, she was listening and realized that he was passionate about my work, and that he might be a huge fan, supporter, or even asset to us some day.
It was a valuable lesson for me about one little thing (listening) that you can do to improve your networking skills.
What can you teach your employees about connecting with clients, co-workers, supervisors, or strangers that will improve your business?

Are You Overlooking These 5 Branding Opportunities?

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Two days ago a friend of mine asked me to review her résumé. Since she’s a graphic designer, I wasn’t surprised that some elements of it reflected her design style. She didn’t just pull up an MS Word template and fill it out.
This made me wonder: Apart from the usual web sites, business cards, and letterheads, are there other opportunities for us to brand ourselves?

Résumé. To elaborate on my friend’s job-hunting experience, she noticed that as she lined up for job interviews, a few of the other candidates had creative résumés as well. Though it may be common for designers, I don’t see why people working in other industries shouldn’t take a similar approach. As long as the execution is legible, cohesive and easy to understand, it may be a good way to stand out from the crowd of applicants. Georgina provided some excellent creative résumé pointers in a recent post.
Email signature. You can also use your business tagline or brand statement under your name in your email signatures. If overdone, this can seem too bothersome and intrusive, so keep the statement short and simple. I’ve seen some colleagues use this differently as well, adding links to industry-relevant PDF reports and white papers they’ve written. Your email signatures don’t have to be always be branded in the same way, either. Use a different signature for each target audience.
Invoices. Even the documents you use to charge customers can be a branding opportunity. If you send paper invoices, this also helps to make sure that the client won’t lose it in a pile of paperwork. For inspiration, you can check out these creative invoices featured by Smashing Magazine.
Milestone sheets, progress reports and other related documents. It’s perfectly sensible to put your logo in these documents, even if you’re already working with a client and don’t necessarily have to sell new services to them. Branding your documents in the same way you brand promotional materials ensures consistency. If these files are misplaced, the client only has to look at the logo to see who sent them.
Avatars. Our social media avatars are usually the first impressions that new contacts have about us. Having a strong image in your avatar makes the branding happen earlier than, say, waiting for them to look at your blog or web site. Last year, Aliza wrote an extensive post on this subject.
Which of these branding opportunities do you already use? Are there other uncommon ways you brand yourself online?
Image by bury-osiol from sxc.hu

Control Your Online Identity With An SEO Optimized Biography Site

Originally Posted Here

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One of the ironies of a person’s online identity is that the harder you try to hide your identity from the search engines, the more likely you will be hit harder once something leaks to the web.

So what’s the big deal about your online identity? Why should you even care? As the Internet has evolved into a massive research warehouse of data on almost anyone in the world, employers and background researchers often turn there first to quickly learn whatever they can about a potential employee. Anything they discover could either work for you or against you. So, how can you make sure that the Internet is working in your favor?

One option is certainly to use tools to hide from the search engines, going so far as to mask your IP whenever you’re on the net, or use disposable web tools to hide your identity, as Aibek described how to do. Doing this will protect you for a while, until someone else decides to publish something unflattering about you online. If you have a unique name, then you can be sure that the single page that the search engine can find about you – the unflattering page – is the one that will come up at the very top of the search engine results. Not a good thing.

One of the best ways to manage your online identity, particularly if you are a prolific online writer, is to take control of your online identity by owning the domain for your name and then by dominating the SEO niche for your identity.

[POLL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS] If You’re Looking For A Job, Did You…

Original Post [POLL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS] If You’re Looking For A Job, Did You…

I find the 2nd place result to be particularly surprising.

We’ll get to that, but…

First: how I screwed up

Before I get to the results or the analysis, let me tell you how I screwed up with this poll, or more specifically, with how I told you about it.
When I first published the poll on JobMob a few weeks ago, I thought that the voting mechanism wouldn’t let you vote from the article itself, and that you would need to click through to the website. With that in mind, I put an image of the poll in the article so that when you clicked through to vote, you would easily recognize it in the sidebar here on JobMob:

Believe it or not, it never occurred to me that people would see that image and think they could vote by clicking on it, which now seems so obvious that I probably would have done it myself.
The only reason I realized my mistake was because people who did click through to the website also tried voting by clicking on the image, and I was able to see that using a tool called CrazyEgg:

Hopefully, some of the image clickers also realized what was going on and then actually voted in the sidebar. In any case, once I saw this, I immediately removed the poll image and put the actual poll into the announcement article.
Lesson learned: from now on, no more images of polls!

The poll results and what they mean

Here are the official results of the poll:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
40% Get laid-off from your last job?
This answer was expected because of the 2009 recessions in the countries that most JobMob visitors come from, like the USA, Israel and the UK.
One thing worth pointing out is that I specifically didn’t distinguish between ‘got laid-off’ and ‘got fired’. For a poll to work well, the answer choices need to be clear so that your vote comes to you right away. Although ‘laid off’ and ‘fired’ don’t mean exactly the same thing, and since the difference might not exist in all countries and cultures, I decided to just keep things simple.
26% Quit your last job?
Like I said at the top, I find this result the most surprising. During a recession, you would normally sit tight in your job because there are so few other ones available, unless of course, you have a good reason to believe differently in your case.
If you voted this way, can you tell us why you quit now of all times?
21% You’re looking for your first job
There was a good comment by Esther on the poll announcement about how the poll didn’t take into account stay-at-home moms who were now making their way back into the workforce, but I can imagine that this was the option they would have chosen, alongside graduates, newly-released soldiers, etc.
13% Have a contract that just ended?
A follow-up question: if you voted this, and you’re a freelancer, are you now looking for a salary job or more freelance work?
If you liked this article, you’ll enjoy What Is Your Biggest Job Search Problem? [POLL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS].
Subscribe to JobMob via RSS or email and follow me on Twitter for more job search polls and insight.
-- Jacob Share, Job Search Expert and Professional Blogging Consultant