Expert Job Search Advice

During my lengthy job search I’ve written and collected a lot of blog postings. Despite experts continuing to insist, you can blog your way to a new job, I’m not convinced that will work for everyone. So I’ve collected together in one place the best advice and resources I found during my own lengthy job searches. I also pruned the external links in 2026 as few websites seem to maintain working links for twenty plus years. Some publishers clearly don’t understand that time is money, this website basically makes me no money and has cost me so much time, so my patience with other people’s shittier websites and inability to maintain even a basic level of functionality is zero. I’m going to delete the link and get on with the rest of my life.

My Posts

• Looking for a job online
• Moving to Vancouver and Finding a Job
• The largest employers in Vancouver
• How not to write a Cover Letter

More Advice

• How to Prepare for an Interview
• The Real Secret to Career Success: Confidence
• 30-minute guide to rocking your next coding interview
• Ask Slashdot: Is LinkedIn still Relevant?
• Why building a bot to spam job applications doesn’t work
• After bombing 23 job interviews…
• 10 Costly Job-Search Mistakes You Have to Stop Making
• 3 Questions Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Asks Before Hiring Anyone
• You Will be Googled
• Your Resume Is NEVER Enough to Get the Job You Want
• Submitting an Online Job Application? How to Help the Bots Read Your Resume
• 8 Ways to Fast-Track Your Application
• Didn’t Get The Job? Do This…
• Why I Won’t Hire You
• 12 Tips On Acing Your Next Phone Interview
• 7 Deadly Skype Interview Sins
• HOW TO: Set Up an Online Resume
• 4 Ways to Defeat Job Search Desperation
• What to Know Before You Apply to a Startup

One of the most important tools for jobseekers used to be RSS and Atom feeds. I’ve written on how they can be leveraged and sourced, but I also found a video clip explaining how I and others use them in our job search. UPDATE: Craigslist doesn’t seem to advertise this but my RSS feed reader can still find feeds given a URL of the format:

http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/jjj?query=keyword

It of course works for other cities too. Choose your keyword carefully.

Final Thoughts

You have to fill your time while unemployed in a positive way. Volunteer or learn a new skill. Demonstrate you are talented and hardworking. I ended up doing a lot of reading plus collecting a lot of quotations. I eventually made a web mashup, some of them are a source of motivation, insight, and inspiration. One book I read was “Rework” from which I previously posted the following excerpt:

Hire great writers

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills pay off.

That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in some else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those qualities you want in any candidate.

Writing is making a comeback all over our society. Look at how much people e-mail and text-message now rather than talk on the phone. Look at how much communication happens via instant messaging and blogging. Writing is today’s currency of good ideas.

If you have any job search tips or advice for job seekers you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on January 22nd, 2013, it was last edited on July 11th, 2026 and is filed under: Advice and tagged: Cover Letter, Job Search, Resume.