Image by John and Keturah via Flickr

When you’re looking for work, keeping up with the online job listings is a job in itself. This tutorial will teach you how to automate your job search so you can quickly scan through lots of fresh, relevant job ads every day.

The Big Picture

We are going to put in a series of 5-10 different job search queries into our favorite job boards. The search results they return will have an RSS feed, enabling us to “subscribe” to the search results in a feed reader. After that, all we have to do is open the feed reader, and it will “re-search” all those sites and line up the freshest results in one list for us. From that point, you can just scan quickly down headlines, picking out your dream job. If this sounds too complicated, stay tuned– it’s easy.

You will need:
1) Your favorite RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader)
2) A few RSS-enabled job search websites (I used CraigsList and SimplyHired.com)

Step 1: Creating Good Search Queries

Let’s go to SimplyHired.com and type in a search for the perfect job we’re looking for.

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SimplyHired will return a list of search results fitting our query. This list is “RSS-enabled”, meaning you can subscribe to it in any feed reader (like Google Reader). Just right click ( or Ctrl+click for Mac) on “View RSS Feed” and select “Copy Link Location”.

Copy Link Location

Then you can paste that RSS feed URL into Google Reader’s “Add Subscription” button, and it will “subscribe” you to those search results.

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This means that you will have a long list of headlines for all the relevant job ads.

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Step 2: REPEAT with different search results!

If I go back and repeat the process, typing similar search queries, such as “Computer Educator” or “Multimedia Teacher”, I can get several different feeds of good job results all aggregated in a list in my Google Reader.

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Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 3: Easily Scan through as Many Job Listings as You Can  Handle– Even via iPhone!

Now, I have a folder of job searches I’ve subscribed to, so all I have to do is open the “Job Search” folder and I can scan through an aggregated, multi-threaded list of fresh job search results on my smartphonewhile I’m walking my dog in the morning.

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My method for keeping on top of them is to “Star” the ones that look promising while I’m scanning through, then follow up on the “Starred” ones later. That list of starred entries becomes my “application to-do” list.

Do you have a better way of scanning job ads? Discuss it in the comments!

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