Luckily, for those of us with our résumés in LinkedIn, there are services available to do all of the visually creative stuff for you. All you need to do is sync your LinkedIn account and your visual résumé is ready for use.

Here’s two of the best visual résumé creators you can try for free.

Update Your LinkedIn Profile First!

Firstly, since both of these great visual résumé services import your information from your LinkedIn profile, the best approach to creating a great résumé would be to update your details in LinkedIn before you start exploring these options. That, and your LinkedIn profile is more useful when updated regularly, too.

Vizualize.me

Vizualize.me is a one-click LinkedIn service, meaning you can jump straight into viewing your visual résumé and creating eye-catching content. The content is taken from LinkedIn, but it’s not a two-way sync so nothing will be saved back to LinkedIn after you’ve finished.

There are several great themes to choose from, plus a lot of control over which details are shown in the profile and exactly which colours to use for your style. The resulting infographics are rich and well-designed.

Recommendations from colleagues look especially good in the Vizualize.me format, making a feature of your achievements as seen by the people you work with. Don’t forget that word-of-mouth recommendations are the most memorable! Make sure those kind words about you get noticed.

Re.vu

Re.vu gets you to create an account and choose your URL before linking to your LinkedIn account. Then it’s a simple authorisation process with LinkedIn to get your details imported. You can further tweak your details if you wish, or upload a photo and a résumé in document form if you like.

Once you’ve saved the basic information, you’ll be able to choose a theme for your profile and decide exactly how you’d like your information presented. Then, simply promote it as you wish and update the details whenever you need to.

The re.vu themes are eye-catching and stylish, plus they allow you to upload your own background if you want to personalise the page further. The visualisation of your work history is especially good if you’ve worked multiple jobs as it shows clearly how you’ve spent your work time.

Choices

Both of these services provide great profiles for jobseekers. If I were to make comparisons, I’d say Vizualize.me had more bells and whistles, while Re.vu was easy enough for the average grandparent to understand. Both profiles looked fantastic and took very little time to create. I’d personally recommend using both – since you can’t have too many résumés out there working to get you a job.

More Reading For Jobseekers

These articles will probably also be of interest to you:

• 3 Ways To Meaningfully Visualize Your LinkedIn Network
• Try Signal & Learn How To REALLY Use LinkedIn
• BranchOut Business Networking Rivals LinkedIn [News]
• Top 3 Websites To Build A Free Resume Online

Has a visual résumé helped you to find work? Would you ever wear your résumé on a t-shirt?  What unique ways have you found work?

Craigslist is an obvious solution, and one I’m familiar with, as I’ve worked with several businesses that I found through Craigslist’s Jobs section. However, I also found myself wasting time on supposed opportunities that turned out to be scams. Learn from my experience and you’ll save yourself time and heartache.

Don’t Pay To Play

Okay, okay. This one might seem a little obvious, but I feel like it is worth saying for those who are just starting in the world of Craigslist job hunting.

Never, ever pay for job opportunities.

Often, these are scams, but they’re not always so blatant. Creative types, such as writers, graphical artists and even programmers, will often come across advertisements for job boards focused on a specific area of expertise. Joining is usually free, but you’re not allowed to apply to jobs without paying – or if you’re allowed to apply, your application is given some disadvantage that virtually guarantees you won’t be selected.

Technically, sites like this aren’t always scams because some people do in fact find jobs through them. Even if you do find an opportunity, however, it will often be of poor quality. The employers who use these boards are often aware that someone desperate enough to pay money to find jobs will also be willing to work on the cheap.

Avoid Suspicious Sales Jobs

Another folly that often trips up Craiglist job searches are the mysterious sales jobs. These are companies that compensate their employees primarily by a sales commission, and often promise outrageous income for little work. Such a job might not be bad if reasonable base pay was available, or if employees weren’t often expected to spend significant amounts of their own time and money in the search for a big sale.

Ironically, these jobs often catch searchers off guard with promises of high base pay. Usually this is qualified by a phrase such as “per appointment” or “expected” because employees are paid not by the hour but for individual sales appointments and leads, plus whatever commission comes from them.

Also look out for group job interviews or promises of preliminary training sessions made by overly enthusiastic employers. Often these so-called interviews turn in to sales pitches, where employers eagerly convince a captive audience to ignore the terrible base pay and lack of benefits in the hopes of earning big commissions.

Apply Now! Seriously

The Internet is all about the now. News, now! Entertainment, now! And of course, jobs – right now!

If you’re going to be successful on Craigslist, you need to approach it with the ability to act immediately. Often, an employer who posts a general advertisement will receive a few hundred resumes within a day. The chances that you’ll be picked aren’t great if you’re not one of the first twenty or thirty applicants. Job hunters applying to positions that require special skills will have a little more time, but it never hurts to be quick.

How can you make sure that you’re one of the first to apply? Use Craigslist’s RSS feeds! Many people forget that this function is available, and I don’t blame them, because the site tucks its RSS feed button down in the bottom right hand corner of its pages. If you want to be lightning-quick, subscribe to your local Craiglist Jobs RSS feed both on your computer and on your mobile device.

Tapping Out Templates

Using templates is controversial among job hunters, but I fall on the side of using them. Today’s high-volume online job search forces hunters to be brief, giving them time to apply for as many jobs as possible.

What I don’t recommend however, is that hunters use pre-packaged templates. Instead, create your own! This can easily be done using Microsoft Word. My suggestion is to create templates for each specific type of job you might apply for, such as customer service, office management, etc. Make sure the template has sections where the name of the specific company you are applying to, if known, can be inserted.

You can even save a copy of the template to your email or on your mobile device so that it can be altered with a document editing app. This will make it possible for you to apply while out and about, ensuring that your application arrives first!

Use Alternative Craigslist Search Engines

Perhaps the biggest limitation you’ll encounter when using Craigslist to search for jobs is Craigslist itself. The grouping of jobs and locations that you are sorting through may not be the best for your specific job hunt.

Fortunately, there are other Craigslist search engines that can help you. We’ve already covered these in a separate article, so go check them out! They could save you a lot of time.

Conclusion

Job hunting is no one’s idea of fun, but these tips will hopefully keep your time unemployed as short as possible. If you have any of your own advice, let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Job Hunting – The Blog 

However LinkedIn isn’t only good for networking: those who maintain detailed LinkedIn profiles can turn them into informative online resumes to jump start their job search.

There are a few handy tools that will both allow you quickly import your LinkedIn professional summary, help make it look neat and professional and even let you host your resume for free.

Here are a couple of great options:

Resume Builder

Resume Builder is by far the quickest way to turn your LinkedIn profile into a professionally looking, minimalist resume. It was created as part of LinkedIn Labs and the whole process takes no more than a few minutes:

1. Start here and sign into your LinkedIn profile;
2. Look over your professional summary and edit / delete any information you need;
3. Pick a resume template that best suits your style: clean, modern, business, gray, law and more.

Now you can download your resume as PDF, print it, share online (via email, Facebook or Twitter). Note that you will need to set the resume as public to be able to start sharing it.

You can also use the “outline” mode to change the look of your resume: just remove or drag-and-drop the sections you want to change:

2. DoYouBuzz

DoYouBuzz is an excellent and very user-friendly website that lets you quickly build a detailed resume by fetching your professional information from your LinkedIn profile.

It has both free and paid plans (the latter has a few more appealing templates but I never needed them as the free version has proved absolutely complete).

The process is very well organized – you will be surprised how smoothly you are being moved from step to step until you have the resume ready:

1. Sign up for n account and conform your email;
2. Import your LinkedIn profile;
3. Edit / remove any sections that have been fetched from your LinkedIn profile (or add new sections)
4. Choose and customize your template (you can choose a design and then select your own color palette):

As a result you get a free online Linkedin profile resume that you can both link to or download to send to a potential employee:

Privacy settings and notes:

If you care about your privacy, there are a couple of notable things to mention here:

1. Your resume will have “nocache” header tag which will prevent Google from saving it in its cache. This means that your future employees won’t be able to access the resume previous versions and will only be able to see the current one (this is a very smart feature by the way)
2. There are a few privacy settings inside that allow you to hide your resume from public view, exclude it from DoYouBuzz search results or hide it from everyone.

Note: There’s another similar tool called Comoto but it is not that usable.

Are you aware of any other tools that make it easy to re-package your LinkedIn profile and turn it into the detailed resume? Please let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by michaeln3

However, just leaving didn’t really feel like my style. I mean, I’ve worked for the same company for 13 years and it just didn’t seem cool to just silently walk off into the sunset. Therefore, I decided to share the management shortfalls and corporate shortcomings of this company with the entire world. I decided to “burn my bridges” I guess you could say.

7 Resources To Share How Companies Fail Employees

One thing that I noticed when I was job hunting – around the time when I wrote about the 10 most effective job hunting websites – was that there are a few websites out there where former employees provide completely honest reviews of what it’s like to work at the company. Those sites provide such a great insight of what it’s really like at the company.

Ann offered a few great websites where you can vent about your job or boss, but during my explorations, I discovered 7 more awesome sites where I could provide other job-seekers a similar service, once I quit my job for greener pastures.

Glassdoor

The first of those services is definitely Glassdoor. It’s fast and easy to quickly post a review about any company that you’ve worked for (or are currently working for).

What I like most about Glassdoor is that it allows you the space and freedom to write whatever you like. So long as your comments aren’t vulgar or outrageous and you’re fair and honest with your review, it’ll get published. If you want to get your company review before the eyes of potential employees, this is the place to do it.

Ping My Company

Another great website for slamming your former company and burning those bridges is a site called PingMyCompany. At this site, you can “ping” the company on a variety of factors like management, pay and more. Take a look at what other people have pinged the company for.

Then when you’re ready, go ahead and ping the company yourself. Choose a category that you want to review the company on and then go ahead and post your comments for the world to see. Other users will read your comments and either ping the company up or down based on their own experiences.

Rate Your Company

There is another fairly new website in the company ratings came called RateYourCompany. This website is pretty fast and easy. Just quickly add the company and position information at the top, and then rate the company on the 12 factors listed. You can go ahead and slam them in the areas where you know the company sucks, but be honest in the areas where they don’t.

Payscale

Payscale is another great website to use if you want to warn prospective employees of the pathetic wages that your former employer offers. Just fill out the PayScale survey and make sure to include your salary numbers so that they get tabulated into the overall results that PayScale offers for that employer.

Worked Here

Yet another fairly new employer review website with great potential is WorkedHere. This site offers a unique way to rate companies based on geographic location. That way you can go right to the map to find the company that you work for, quickly click on it and offer your own rating in addition to everyone else’s.

If you don’t see your company listed on the map, then go ahead and add it along with your rating. It’s fast and easy, and all you need to add one is an email account. You can make your rating anonymous if you like.

Rate Your Job, Rate Your Boss

There’s another fairly new ratings website called RateYourJob-RateYourBoss that lets you burn your bridges big time by not only rating how crappy the company is, but also your boss. I personally didn’t feel the need to do this, because I actually liked the boss that I worked with, but I took great pleasure in rating my old company on this site.

LinkedIn

Finally, there is one last site you can use to slam your former company in a big way, and that site is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is fast becoming the site of choice for people that are searching for a new company to work for. What better way to slam your former company than to issue an update about your departure from the company and why.

Leave no doubt as to which company you’re talking about. Search for the company page on LinkedIn, and then click the “Share” button to share a comment about that company. It’s a quick way to slam the company at the same time you’re slamming the door on your way out.

One thing many professionals will tell you when you leave a company is to never burn your bridges. For the most part, this is true. You never know when you may need to work for the company again some day. However, when you’re leaving a particular company that you know beyond any doubt that you’ll never want to work for again – feel free to use the above resources to burn all of those bridges in style.

Have you ever used any of the sites listed above to review a company? Did you ever offer a very negative review? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Daino_16

If you’re uploading a resume that you created the painful way through Microsoft Word, you’ll also have to go through the hassle of converting your resume to PDF in order to prevent the potential employer from seeing the squiggly red lines in your resume indicating that your last name or your most recent employer’s isn’t grammatically recognized, among other formatting risks. Save yourself all the trouble (and time!) and let Y Combinator-funded JobSpice help you build a free resume online in 15-20 minutes!

As JobSpice is built in the actively developed Javascript library, jQuery, you can definitely expect it to be very speedy and easy to use.

What to Include When You Build a Free Resume Online

Like we said before, once you hop onto JobSpice.com, you can literally get started right away because it shows you four placeholders so you can begin typing your basic contact information. Alternatively, you could try adding the resume sections first and then typing away.

By clicking on Add new section on the left sidebar, you can pick from any of the existing sections (Contact Info, Objective, Education, Coursework, Experience, Achievements, Clubs and Affiliations, Skills, Publications) or add your own (Custom Section). Reorder any of the sections with ease.

Fill the Sections Out

After you’ve chosen your sections, plug in your bits of information. To add multiple entries, click on the green (+) icon; to remove them, click on the red (-) icon instead. Even if you accidentally clicked on the other tabs in JobSpice (e.g. Preview or Styles), your work is saved even if you don’t have a JobSpice account (which only takes about 5 seconds to create since you only need an username and a password; no activation email needed).

Preview in Select Templates (“Styles”)

There’s about a dozen Styles in which you can dress up your resume – see yours in a new style instantly in the Preview tab or browse the rest in the Styles tab. If you’re well-versed in HTML and CSS, press on the blue sticker in Styles to make your own or customize a style for an unique look!

Export As PDF or Save Online to Share with Others/Access Resume From Any Computer

To have your freshly composed resume in your machine, JobSpice will deliver the goodies to you in .PDF format when you press on either Print or PDF, while you can also use Save (for which you’ll need an account that you can create by just providing an username and password) if you want to have a copy online in case you want to send your resume from your non-primary computer. The Share function to create your own shareable link (e.g. jobspice.com/anynameyouwant) or add new link names for different resumes. Whoever gets your link will be able to view and download your resume in PDF format.

Manage Your Links and Change Background Color of Your Resume Page

Now that you have an account, you’ll have the ability to view your resume from any computer and manage your links to different resumes, which you can create in Share, so you’ll have customized resumes for different recipients. Say,  you’re applying to a job for which you think a nicely elaborated Objective would enhance your chances, but you don’t regularly include that section. You can store all of your current and past sections (e.g. Objective, Skills, etc.) with the Show/Hide function.

As JobSpice offers many customization options, you will also have the ability to change the background color of the resume you are sending to others. On the Manage tab you’ll see when you’re logged in, click on the Background Color palette and see the instant change when you click on the link above the palette. Here is a quick demo of the results.

If you’re having any trouble or have questions on any functions, try tweeting your question to @jobspice. When I expressed a problem that I had with one of the new features i.e. changing the background color, JobSpice staff fixed my problem within 10 minutes.

As you can see here, JobSpice makes the process of building a free resume online a lot more fun and makes a great update to other resume-hosting websites, and template-gifting sites. Let us know in the comments if you have tried or plan to use the service!

You have to remember that hundreds of thousands of people who have given up their job search in the depths of the recession are all going to pile back onto the job market quicker than you can say “˜credit crunch’.

So I thought I’d share with you a tip I use when I’m looking for more blogging jobs. This tip can be applied for when you’re looking for work, a new house, great deals and other thing that are hard to come by. I simply set up iGoogle to perform how I want it to so it can become my Mission HQ.

Firstly, go to Google (if you don’t already have an account, create one). In the top right-hand corner click iGoogle. Then, from the tabs located to the left of the screen click ‘Add a tab‘ and give it an appropriate name in the box which appears.

Now that your new tab is created we have to add some gadgets which will help you in your job search. Our main tool here will be the RSS gadget so I need you to do the following.

Visit sites specific to your job search. Craigslist will cover pretty much everything from jobs to houses to items for sale. Most other jobs search websites also offer RSS feeds as a way of bringing you back to the site with the promise of alerts. Right-click on the feed’s icon and copy the address. Then go back to iGoogle.

Click on the ‘Add Stuff‘ link at the top right of the screen. Along the left-hand side in the sidebar you’ll see an Add Feed or Gadget link. Click on that and paste in the link address you copied from the RSS link on the job site and click ‘Add‘.

The RSS feed should now appear in iGoogle like my example at the bottom of this post. Keep repeating this procedure for all the job searches (or any other search) you like. Here are some popular websites which offer RSS feeds and jobs, apartments and more are frequently posted.

• Craigslist
• Twitter (perform a search and then use the RSS feed for that search)
• Indeed
• Yahoo HotJobs
• Monster

For more job search websites, click here.

Finally, click on ‘Change Theme from Classic‘ and select one of the cool themes they have there. This doesn’t really improve your iGoogle HQ but you don’t want to turn on your computer every day and see the same generic theme, do you?

Now all you have to do is check back daily and follow up on anything promising. Without a doubt you’re ahead of the competition by making iGoogle your search HQ because while you’re giving the advertisers a call they’re still rummaging through search results.

Photo Credit: Danard Vincente