Alright, when jobs open up, they are often snapped up insanely fast. You can look on Craigslist or in your local news paper for the job listings, but even then sometimes they are taken within days. Even worse, lots of jobs aren't even listed in this 'traditional' way. The more and more people that use the internet, the more and more chances there are of jobs being listed online. But you can't search every nook and cranny on the internet! That would be ridiculous to assume and impossible.
But do you know who can check every nook, cranny, blog, website, classified site, and newspaper on the internet?
Google can.
Yes, that's what Google really does, Google is constantly indexing and crawling websites. Every time I post something on this website, Google is notified, and at some point will 'crawl' this page and index the content onto the web search function. But, Google doesn't just add my site to the search rankings, Google in some respects, reads my website and sees the words that I've typed out. When I mention Jobs, or Jobs in Asheville NC, google will find out that I've used those key words.
Now here's the cool part. You can ask Google to tell you when someone publishes something on the interesting that is interesting to you. Its called Google alerts, and I've had great success with them. Just this morning I was informed that there were two new job openings in Asheville, one as a FULL TIME HOUSEKEEPER and another Occupational Therapist job. These jobs were only just listed, and I am probably one of the first people to find out about them. They came from different websites I'd never visited before.
All I did was sign up for an alert for the keyword "Asheville Jobs". Anytime Google sees something new that contains "Asheville Jobs" it will send me an email with all the links.
Now, I used something really, really general. Just Asheville Jobs isn't going to be very targeted to you if you are looking for a job as a doctor or bar tender. But, if you are looking for something general like that Housekeeper job I found, something super general like that could work well for you.
Now, let's figure out how we go about doing this. First things first, you are going to need to go over to google alerts which is located here. They recently (Google INC) updated this function and made it look a lot nicer and more Web 2.0 if you will. Alerts is basically a way to monitor what's going on in the web that you want to find out about. For people with a reputation to keep, or people who get mentioned a lot (famous people like congressmen, or the like) can keep alerts for their Name. When somebody mentions them, they are instantly alerted. Imagine how useful that is. Also, think about your business if you have one. Wouldn't you like to get alerted every time someone mentioned your business on their blog or website! Imagine how helpful that would be, especially if it was a Forum and somebody was asking questions about your or your business. Even if you had never heard of that forum before, you could easily sign up and answer their question. I bet that's super helpful for business.
Anyway, we know how this works by now right? So, under Search query: you are going to type what you want to be alerted when its published. For me its just "Asheville Jobs". For you, it might be better if it was something more specific. A warning however, the more specific you go, the smaller chance of Google finding something each day. I'd suggest making multiple alerts. This way you cover your bases.
You can choose what type of places your alert will come from. If you are in business or a famous star, you might only want it to be news and or blogs. But for now, I'd suggest going with Everything. This will give you results from websites, blogs, registered news sites, books, discussions, and more.
Next, I personally would click once a day under "how often". This basically stops you from getting lots of emails. Instead of getting an email instantly when its published, you will just get one larger email at the end or beginning of the day. I personally prefer one big email to 5 emails at random times per day. However, this isn't as important and its all up to you.
Now, if you are using a keyword that is just huge like "NFL" or "dogs" or "president obama" you probably want to limit "How many:" to "Only the best results". This will narrow down how many things are in the email. For something as specific as "Asheville Jobs" or "Jobs in Asheville" I wouldn't limit the results. You probably won't get an overwhelming amount. But yeah, for Tim Tebo or Obama or Ron Paul you definitely would want to limit yourself to the best results.
Finally you just insert your email address, or the email address you want the alerts to go to. You have to confirm the alert inside your email (this just prevents me from spamming a friend's email with a ton of alerts haha).
Now, if you register multiple alerts you will get an email each day for that alert, unless you chose the option to send emails as the results are published. I don't find this annoying, at all, but once you found what you want, its probably a good idea to cancel the alert. Its super easy to cancel, you just press a button "cancel alert" in an email.
And that's how you can get on top of the competition (other job seekers) for Asheville Jobs!
