LibraryWorks

The LibrariansYellowPages and Library Associates, a recruitment firm, have partnered together to offer a job board called LibraryWorks. Currently all of the postings point back to LibGig, also a creation of Library Associates.

I don't know if their plan is to become a vertical search engine for library jobs or if this is just another way to drive traffic to their postings. The interface is clean and has a nice mix of jobs, but you can't sign up alerts or subscribe via RSS. It's early days, but so far days of meh.

Not a day without a conference

Marian Dworaczek has posted a list of upcoming conferences that are relevant to librarians.

DOL Job Tool Challenge

The Department of Labor is running a Job Tool Challenge to find the best online tools for job seekers. The submission period has passed, but you can vote on the tools that were submitted. Tools include social media tools, blogs, vertical search and job or career matching services. You can use these tools as a current job seeker or integrate them into your media instruction classes in libraries.

• The Project
• The Job Tool Challenge, for voting on the tools.
  

Help from resume reviewers

I am looking for librarians who have been involved in a recent hiring campaign at their library (past year) who would be willing to give advice about how to properly format resumes. Librarians from any type of library, including special and people who work outside of traditional library fields are most welcome.

ere shares the bad news

ERE.net shares the bad news on job losses, but puts some perspective to the reports.

Two Perspectives on Work

CBC's Spark has two perspectives on work, from Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, amongst others, and Matthew B. Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft.

Going freelance

Gina Trapani explains how to go freelance. I don't know how many people still hold on to the misconception that you quit and "hang out your shingle" but her advice on how to build gradually, getting your name out there and when to give your work away is helpful and probably true to most freelance experience (it is to mine).

Jason Alba on Twitter

Jason Alba, creator of JibberJobber, also the writer for the JibberJobber blog, has a good post on using Twitter effectively. I agree: people are busy, they don't like technology, and there isn't a great deal of evidence yet that all of the effort put into job seeking on Twitter can actually lead to a job.

For librarians, using Twitter for information sharing makes sense. If you just happen to get a job out of it, double bonus points.

Who's reading your email?

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, it's getting a bit tougher--before the courts anyway--to monitor an employee's email. What I found fascinating is that 38% of companies have someone on staff whose job it is to read outgoing emails.

And that means your personal accounts, too. At least if you access them from the office:

In another case this year, Bonnie Van Alstyne, a former vice president of sales and marketing at Electronic Scriptorium Ltd., a data-management company, was in the thick of a testy legal battle in Virginia state court with the company over employment issues when it came to light that her former boss had been accessing and reading her personal AOL email account. The monitoring went on for more than a year, continuing after Ms. Van Alstyne left the company. Ms. Van Alstyne sometimes used her personal email account for business purposes, and her supervisor said he was concerned that she was sharing trade secrets.

The supervisor, Edward Leonard, had accessed her account "from home and Internet cafes, and from locales as diverse as London, Paris, and Hong Kong," according to legal filings in the case.

Ms. Van Alstyne sued Mr. Leonard and the company for accessing her email without authorization. A jury sided with her, and the case eventually settled.

Um, she left the company. Continuing to access her personal account after she is gone sounds like stalking to me. I wonder if Mr. Leonard is still with the company?

Best and Worst Metro Areas

SimplyHired has released their data on the best and worst metro areas for job postings for September 2009. The results compare the number of non-duplicate posts to number of unemployed in that area.

Use TweetDeck to update Twitter Job Searches

I'm still skeptical about using Twitter to find work, mainly because I have not met anyone personally who has found work via Twitter. But I did configure a search on TweetDeck (which I think makes plain Twitter functional) that may be helpful for those determined to prove me wrong.

Basically, TweetDeck is an app for Twitter that helps you manage your tweets. You can also run searches on Twitter, via TweetDeck and get pop-up updates if your search terms appear in Twitter. (These pop-ups are slightly annoying, but if you are Twitter-obsessed, perhaps you love their cheerful appearance.) Anyway, once you are signed in to TweetDeck or have downloaded it onto your desktop or iPhone, you can stay updated on your Twitter feed and get refreshed searches.

You can just type in your keywords/search terms, you don't need the hashtags because the search will send you posts where the search terms appeared, whether they have hashtags or. Since supplying a hashtag is voluntary on the part of the tweeters, this means you will get posts both with and without hashtags. (This, of course, can be good and bad, but if you are determined to use Twitter, you are determined to try anything.)

I would recommend running a Boolean AND, of the keyword for the profession you are looking for AND jobs, so you don't get the librarian saved my life tweets, or something about weird fantasies from people hanging out in the reference section (amazing what glasses and some smarts do to some people's libidos).

You can run several different searches, four displays nicely, but just remember that you will need to scroll sideways to view them all.

Now let's see if running searches on Twitter can actually lead to a real person, who will post a real comment that they found a real job--not just a posting or an interview, the full meal deal--through Twitter. I would prefer to hear from librarians and their successes, but I'll take anyone who can prove that Twitter got them employed.

Employers sidestep recruiters...from the Globe and Mail

WK4US has been having a discussion about how to use LinkedIn properly for finding work, and one of the members of the list posted this article from the Globe and Mail, Employers sidestep recruiters to tap social media.

The employers are using social media, but they are also exploiting the power of weak ties--finding a job through an acquaintance. They are using the "refer a friend" feature found on many online networking sites. This means that if in your circle of friends, they come across a posting that would be of interest to you and they pass it on, just as the workers in this article are posting job opportunities on their Facebook walls for their friends to read.

Chances are many of your friends have a similar background and skill set (you can read Mouw's articles about social capital for more on this topic), and employers are tapping into this via social networking. It isn't new, though the medium is making it more visible--not everyone would see the posting for employees on the church bulletin board.

The interviewed employers in the article appear to mainly come from the retail sector.