MakeUseOf » LinkedIn

Two Easy Ways To Create Visual Infographics Of Your Résumé

Angela Alcorn — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:31:00 +0000

Creative jobseekers are always searching for new ways to distinguish themselves to potential employers. One of the quickest ways to do this is to make your résumé stand out from the crowd. Once you’ve got their attention, they’ll hopefully notice all those great skills you have. In the meantime, you’ve got to turn your résumé into something which looks really interesting. And who’s got the time for that?

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.

Favo.rs: A Site For Getting & Granting Favors

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:01:46 +0000

One advantage of the Internet is that you can build relationships with a wide range of people from various demographics that you may never physically meet. Social network sites like Twitter and Facebook are worldwide Internet forums in which we can get news and information in a short amount of time.

Now another community-based site called Favo.rs has come out of Beta release with the specific purpose of getting professionals to “build and strengthen relationships by exchanging valuable help with one another”. In short, Favo.rs is all about asking and granting favors.

How It Works

Favo.rs works similarly to Twitter and Facebook in that after you join the site you build a list of contacts by following existing members, and by inviting your friends and contacts on other professional social networking sites like LinkedIn.

The Favo.rs homepage is set up for you to ask a question or favor you want, or respond to a favor or request. Your request can be a general one, or more targeted towards getting feedback on say your new business website; asking your followers to promote a particular product or service, or request introductions to other people who may be of help to you.

Favo.rs is like attending a professional networking gathering in which you exchange information and ideas, get connected with other important people, and ask for advice and help with your business or job pursuits.

Sample favors listed on Favo.rs so far include members asking other members to “like” them on Facebook, request for feedback on a re-designed website, a request for followers on Twitter, and recommendations for talented iOS developers.

Favors Feed

The hubbub of your Favo.rs homepage consists of the Favors Feed that lists the most popular requests and favors by members of the site. Another tab contains the activities of the people you are following, followed by a section devoted to the Top Members of the site who are the most active. All your favorite requests get listed in a separate tab as well.

You can also search requests by people, tags, and specific favors. It would be useful however if the Favors Feed could be filtered by topics, categories or tags. As membership for the site grows, the Feed will undoubtedly get very long and difficult to manage. Being able to filter favor requests beyond conducting searches might be helpful.

Building A Reputation

As you respond to requests and favors of other members on the site, you begin to build a reputation, and go from being labeled a Rookie (“help others less than 10 times”), to Participant, Advocate (a high level of helping others), and Benefactor (the top 5% of helpers.) You earn points and thank you badges that get listed on your profile as you participate.

Generally, Favo.rs asks that you grant as many favors as you ask, which will increase your status and credibility on the site.

Favo.rs is set up for you to broadcast favorite requests directly to your social networks without having to leave the site. You even get to forward requests to specific friends on your social network.

Activity Dashboard

If you find yourself becoming very active on Favo.rs, you can use the Activity Dashboard to get an overview of the top 5 most helpful numbers, the top 5 people you have helped, and the top 5 people who helped you in the last 30 days.

If you link Favo.rs to your LinkedIn profile and other social networking sites, you will be able to directly invite members to join Favo.rs.

How useful a site like Favo.rs becomes depends upon a vibrant active membership. Let us and the developers of Favo.rs know what you think of the site. Do you think it could be more useful than existing and similar social networking sites?

How To Avoid Appearing In Social Ads In Facebook & LinkedIn

Ann Smarty — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:30:46 +0000

Social ads are somewhat a new Internet phenomena invented by Facebook (I suppose). They have caused plenty of discussions and anger from the Internet community but social ads, obviously, have survived and flourished.

A social advertisement works in a very straightforward way: if you, by a coincidence or whatever reason, have liked a Facebook page or ad, your friends will see your “like” next time they see the same advertisement. You might feel comfortable with that, however most people are not aware of the fact that by simply “liking” something (and thus expressing a passive form of appreciation), they also start recommending the same thing to their friends. LinkedIn launched a somewhat similar form of social advertising this summer.

Another disturbing thing is that in both systems, you find yourself automatically “opted-in” the social advertising system. Yes, you can opt out, but only if you know about the system and can spend a little effort and a few minutes of your time to do a quick research on how to disable it for your profile. So here’s a quick guide for those who feel they don’t want to participate in social advertising at LinkedIn and Facebook.

Opt out of Social Ads at Facebook

Facebook social ads show an advertiser’s message alongside actions you have taken, such as liking a Page. This means that if you have liked a page which is being advertised through Facebook, your friends will see that you have once liked that page (and may feel more likely to do the same):

We have mentioned how to stop appearing in social ads at Facebook in our extensive guide on safeguarding your Facebook privacy. However Facebook is in a good habit of constantly moving privacy settings all around and now the necessary option seems to be in a completely different section.

To find the way to opt out of Facebook social advertising, click a tiny arrow next to “Home” link in the upper-right corner of the screen and choose “Account Settings“. There click “Facebook Ads” in the left-hand panel.

Now, scroll down to the second option, read about the social ads and, if you are still not convinced that you want to participate in them, click “Edit social ads setting”.

There you can at last set whether you want your friends to see your name in an ad or whether you prefer to opt out:

Note: Independent of this setting, you may still see social actions in other contexts, like in Sponsored Stories or paired with messages from Facebook.

Opt out of Social Ads at LinkedIn

LinkedIn took a step further in social advertising: it shows your photo alongside an ad. Here’s an example of such an ad from the official LinkedIn blog. As far as you can see, people who have been following a company group, are now unwillingly advertising their services:

To opt out, you need to login to LinkedIn and click this link. There click “Manage Social Advertising” and un-check the option allowing LinkedIn to use your name and photo in social advertising:

Do you feel inclined of opting out of Facebook social ads? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

** Editor’s note : This is Ann’s last post with MakeUseOf after exactly three years writing for us. She is leaving to pursue her own projects and will be greatly missed by everyone here. Please join me in wishing her all the very best for the future. **

2 Tools To Turn Your LinkedIn Profile Into A Neat-Looking Resume

Ann Smarty — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:30:34 +0000

I have already mentioned that LinkedIn has proved the most meaningful social media network for me for years: I have found that, because of its business focus, it is less vulnerable to spam than other social media networks, almost clutter-free and much more productive.

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:

Start here and sign into your LinkedIn profile;
Look over your professional summary and edit / delete any information you need;
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:

Sign up for n account and conform your email;
Import your LinkedIn profile;
Edit / remove any sections that have been fetched from your LinkedIn profile (or add new sections)
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:

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)
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

Flipboard 1.5 Rolls Out LinkedIn Integration & Other Features [News]

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:31:26 +0000

RSS feed apps for the iPad are almost a dime a dozen, but only a few top ranking ones have the magazine style quality and features of Flipboard, the first in its category. Last week Flipboard rolled out a slew of upgrade features, a few not found in the RSS apps of its three top competitors - Pulse, Feedly, and Zite.

Flipboard CEO, Mike McCue said on TechCrunchTV that the upgraded Flipboard has been downloaded by over 2.5 million users.

New Features

The 1.5 version of Flipboard includes faster red ribbon access to all your social networks, favorite sections, and a wide range of pre-selected feeds to choose among, from news and business to sports and science. You can actually now view the content of feeds without adding them to your own list.

You can do a search for people, publications, websites, or topics such as National Geographic, Design or Ashton Kutcher. You can add MakeUseOf simply by tapping on the red ribbon in the upper-right side of the screen and typing, “makeuseof.com” in the search field. Select the MUO feed and if you like, add it to your Flipboard.

A few long awaited features of the new Flipboard include the ability to favor open articles, as well the ability to save articles to your Instapaper account.

Since the debut of Flipboard last year, the 1.5 update is faster and more streamlined, but with the same magazine style feel of flipping pages and reading content. Plus now you can use Flipboard to connect with your contacts on Twitter and Facebook, including LinkendIn integration for additional social sharing and updating.

Mike McCue told TechCrunch that the iPhone version of Flipboard is also in the works and will be coming out soon.

Source: TechCrunch

BranchOut Business Networking Rivals LinkedIn [News]

Angela Alcorn — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:31:10 +0000

The BranchOut application for Facebook is gaining popularity so quickly that it has become an instant rival for LinkedIn. The application has become an instant hit with job seekers and employers alike due to its simplicity and extensive networking capabilities.

Users of BranchOut can sign up through Facebook in an instant, then link their LinkedIn profiles immediately. This gives BranchOut readily accessible work history information within seconds, allowing the users to get headhunted and start looking for jobs straight away.

BranchOut’s social capabilities revolve around making it easy to post job openings via their system. The BranchOut home page asks all users “Is Your Company Hiring?” and making it easy for any user to post basic details of job openings in their workplace. BranchOut even fills out most of the details for you from your Facebook information, meaning you can tell your friends about the position in seconds.

Businesses can also use BranchOut to advertise job openings, by using the BranchOut application on their Facebook page. Jobs will be displayed both on the Facebook page and in the BranchOut system.

Jobs are also incorporated into the system via the Indeed network, ensuring there are many open positions ready to consider.

Viewing a job opening will also display to you friends who have connections with that workplace, making it easy for you to arrange an interview via your social network.

Source: BusinessInsider

3 Ways To Meaningfully Visualize Your LinkedIn Network

Ann Smarty — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:30:29 +0000

LinkedIn has always been one of the most useful social media networks for me. The reason is simple: it is business-oriented and (almost) clutter-free. While I do have a large network there, I am almost never spammed or bugged in any way: there no random people who are willing to chat or pitch their products.

The best thing is that people are connected for a reason there: when sending a friend request, you need to specify how you are connected to a person. This way your network contains a wealth of business-oriented information: you can find out how you are related to any company or person you need to get in touch with. Alternatively, you can be introduced to anyone outside your immediate network using your first-level connections.

Tapping into your Linkedin connections can be a great way to discover new career opportunities for personal and professional growth – and here are three tools that can help you to:

1. Visualize Your Network Layers and Influencers: InMaps

InMaps (we have already reviewed InMaps) is a new project inside LinkedIn labs that creates the visual representation of your professional network. The tool goes through your connections, analyzes the links between them and groups them into different network clusters.

It may take some time for larger networks but it is well worth waiting…

The tool can be a huge help in identifying influencers in your business network:

People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections;
Click on any dot to see the person you are connected to as well as where your points of connection overlap.

Besides that, your map is color-coded to represent different affiliations or groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, college classmates, or industries you’ve worked in.

The tool thus turns really helpful for building and expending your reach on many levels but most importantly, it adds some context to your connections: learn why people know each other and how they are connected.

2. Visualize Your Relation to Any Company: MyWebCareer

MyWebCareer is a multi-feature tool that makes sense of your Linkedin and Facebook connections by using sophisticated link analysis, visualization, and semantics technologies

All the content the tools retrieves from your LinkedIn profile is fed into the semantic and entity extraction engine. The output enables you to explore a merged view of your online presence across multiple Internet properties and search engines.

For example, the tool lets you identify your top companies you are associated with as well as top industry you are involved with:

While the above visualization and graphing tools look interesting, the best tool inside is called “My Network” that provides visual interface for exploring your merged Career & Social Graph. It can turn very useful for exploring your relation to any company in your network.

Click on any company name in the list and the tool will show which of your connections is involved in it and how:

Red Links = current position
Blue Links = previous positions
Link Thickness = time at company

If you also have Facebook account tied to MyWebCareer, you’ll be able to see if you are connected to the person through Linkedin or Facebook or both.

For example, here are my LinkedIn contacts who are related to About.com. You can see how long they have been involved into the company, if the are currently working there and how you are connected:

3. Visualize Company and Position Distribution: ManyEyes

ManyEyes (here’s our review of ManyEyes) is a multi-purpose free visualization tool that can process and graph any data you provide. With LinkedIn, you can export the whole list of your connections using AddressBookExport tool. The list will contain:

The full name of each of your contact;
The email address;
The current position;
The company.

The latter two can become a great source for visualization (especially for large networks).

Just format your .CSV file a bit. In my case that was merely about:

Breaking data into columns using comma as delimiter;
Adding informative column headers;
(Possibly) deleting unnecessary rows.

Then copy-paste the area with data into ManyEyes and make sure the data is properly processed using the preview:

Now, choose the visualization type and pattern (there are plenty of those inside). I chose the Matrix Chart that allowed me to visualize position versus company distribution using colors:

As far as you can see, the tool is quite useful for identifying companies with most connections as well.

Have you ever thought of using LinkedIn to grow your professional reach? Do you think these tools may turn useful?

Jibe Connects Facebook & LinkedIn With Job Search

Angela Alcorn — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:31:08 +0000

You always knew the line between LinkedIn and Facebook was pretty hazy when it came to business networking, but it seems it’s now even more entangled. Thankfully, this entanglement is great news for users of either service – and is set up specifically to land you work.

Jibe has stepped into the social networking job market, connecting Facebook data and LinkedIn data seamlessly in order to build you the best possible business network and job-seeker profile. All it takes is a few clicks.

Register With Jibe

Take a look at the Jibe site and you’ll see that it’s very easy to get started. All you do is log in with either your Facebook or LinkedIn credentials. It doesn’t matter which one you choose first, because you can easily link the other a little later.

Network Statistics

The first things you’ll see is an infographic of your network (which you can find again later by clicking Account > My Stats). It’s quite interesting to see some of the positions my friends hold – it would make approaching the right friends for advice very simple. I also now wonder how many of them are making up business names for a laugh. The unemployment statistics are interesting, but are probably thrown out of perspective by the number of people in your network who are students, kids, retired or just don’t list their employment on Facebook.

If you scroll left or right you see more statistics, which I consider to be far more interesting than the original statistics. You can find out what the most popular field of study is within your network, which university is the most popular in your network, which professions are the most popular. These are both fascinating and potentially useful. What if you were considering a change of profession? What if you were a teenager with no idea which university to go to or what to study?

Your Jibe Profile

While you’ve been distracted with shiny statistics, a welcome email has been sent to you and you’re encouraged to set up your profile on Jibe.

First point of call would be to add either Facebook or LinkedIn (whichever is the remaining social network), which is a simple click and authentication. You can get back to the edit screen by clicking on Account.

Pick and choose from the employers and education you’ve listed on Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s a quick click to add each entry, or you can add or edit something specifically for Jibe. Scroll right down to the bottom and add a few interests too, then remember to save your profile.

Jobs

Clicking on the “Jobs” tab opens up all the available jobs. You can filter it by US city, but at this stage there’s no option for other countries or even to choose “anywhere”.

You can filter jobs by your connections too, which also shows you which connection facilitated the addition of that job to your list.

If you like, jobs can be further filtered by job type or employer. Plus, you can search for jobs at any time and with any of the above restrictions by using the search box at the top of every page.

Credits

Jibe’s a little bit viral. In order to convince you to invite more friends, they offer credits for all the friends you invite and when you share jobs to Facebook, then charge you credits when you apply for jobs through Jibe. However, you’re automatically given 400 credits for connecting both Facebook and LinkedIn.

Improvements To Jibe

I think the network statistics could be improved by adding some real-world statistics. For instance, a young person trying to choose a profession to study might like to see which of these professions in their network earn the most. Then perhaps to be able to click to see which qualifications were obtained to get there.

Filtering of jobs could be vastly improved by considering a worldwide perspective. Also, the use of credits to apply for jobs seems a little too restrictive. If none of my friends join Jibe, I’m limited to four job applications. And then what? There’s no word on what happens to you. In my opinion, that severely limits the life of this service. I hope this is something they’ll drop once they’ve got enough users to attract their ideal amount of employers.

More Job-Seeking Goodness

If you’re currently looking for work or just keeping your eyes open, here’s some great MakeUseOf articles to read:

It’s always interesting to see new ways to build a business network and look for work. Jibe is just one of the many new players. What tools do you use and why? Have you found work through social media? Let us know in the comments!

Try Signal & Learn How To REALLY Use LinkedIn

Angela Alcorn — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 21:31:57 +0000

Have you been thinking ahead and building a LinkedIn network so that someday in the future you can help yourself or your friends to get the perfect job? Do you sometimes wonder if it’s worth the effort? Have you even really used LinkedIn yet? Well, that’s all about to change.

LinkedIn has recently opened a beta service to everyone called Signal, which amounts to an entirely new social network based on your LinkedIn network and Twitter. So, even if you have never used any of the previously available LinkedIn features, now there’s a brand new way to use LinkedIn which might just pique your interest.

How To Get Started With Signal

Anyone can join the Signal LinkedIn Beta – just head over to Signal and log into LinkedIn.

To get your tweets to appear in Signal, you’ll need to add Twitter to your LinkedIn profile. If your Twitter account isn’t professional enough, maybe consider starting a new one to add to your LinkedIn profile. If you don’t want your tweets showing up in Signal then disconnect your Twitter account from LinkedIn entirely. You can still view other people’s updates even if you’re not sharing yours.

Now at this stage Signal seems to be limited to Twitter and LinkedIn status updates. However, the main bulk of LinkedIn currently offers an “Activity Stream”. What appears in the LinkedIn activity stream is based on your LinkedIn activity, including your LinkedIn connections and your applications, such as your imported tweets, Amazon books and your imported blog posts. It’s quite probable that the next step for Signal is to incorporate all of your activity stream and allow people to filter exactly what they want to see.

I would therefore advise you to update your LinkedIn activity feed visibility to whatever you’re comfortable with. Keep in mind, this is probably going to get quite public.

Using Signal Filters

The beauty of Signal over using Twitter directly is the many filters it offers, especially those based on the people you know already in LinkedIn. It allows you to expand your business network with one click, rather than searching for people one by one.

Signal also shows a preview of some URLs in-stream, and a summary of popular URLs from your chosen collection of people on the right, in a similar style to the Twitter newspaper services. You can also click on these and see who shared them.

To begin with, you’re given a Signal stream made up from all of your direct LinkedIn connections. That is, ONLY your LinkedIn connections. This is likely to be a collection of people you have actually met or worked with in some way, so that’s already filtered your network’s updates into something manageable and professional compared to viewing Twitter normally.

If you want to network a little, you can click on the “2nd Connections” option and see all your LinkedIn “Friends of Friends“. It’s a lot of people, but it could quickly open your eyes to people you want to be introduced to “” in one click!

For narrowing down the Signal stream, try out the other checkboxes. There’s plenty of choices, including company, school, industry, location, hashtag topics and how recent the update was. If you filter by a sub-category, Signal will let you add your 3rd-level connections too. You can also add a search term in, filtering results by whatever checkboxes you like. The icing on the cake is that you can save your searches for later!

Just think how useful your favourite Twitter hashtags will be when they’re filtered down to just the people you and your friends trust! Or simply filtering by the general industry people have listed themselves in on LinkedIn. Not every tweet will be on topic, but a general picture will emerge which could be good for news-gathering or networking.

Pros & Cons

Signal has opened up the possibilities for Twitter, so if another Twitter client, Twitter itself or Facebook were to do the same thing there’d be a little bit of competition. However, LinkedIn’s Signal has a few things going for it that most other Twitter clients can’t get just yet. The LinkedIn network provides regularly updated industry, education and location information, plus a tiered network of people built on two-way authenticated connections. So the only downside I can see is that not everyone has linked their Twitter accounts and blogs to their LinkedIn account yet. Time to spread the word!

LinkedIn’s Signal is an incredibly powerful way to access Twitter and LinkedIn statuses, plus has the potential for much more. With just a few clicks I had filtered to one industry-filtered corner of a wide network and could see updates I was interested in and people offering relevant jobs to their network. Signal is very powerful, simple and well worth a look.

If you’re looking for work or just looking to make Twitter more organised, you might like these articles:

If you’ve decided to give Signal a go, let us know your best tips and tricks for filtering your network. Have you used it to find work? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

8 Sites For Beating The Job Hunting Blues

Charnita Fance — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:01:37 +0000

With the economy in such a poor state, more and more people are finding it extremely hard to find a job. Sadly, it can literally take months to even be contacted about a job let alone find one, thus resulting in the job hunting blues.

Even though it can get extremely frustrating (I know first hand), the best thing you can do is not give up and keep searching on a consistent basis. If you’ve tried all the usual places like CareerBuilder and Monster and had no luck, here are 8 more that will hopefully get the ball rolling for you.

LinkedIn is definitely growing in popularity for job searching. When searching for jobs, you have the option view jobs that are exclusively on LinkedIn or jobs from the Web.

My favorite thing about LinkedIn is the ability to send and receive recommendations from co-workers and peers. Recommendations are the best way for a company to learn more about you from the people that know you best.

Of course, a complete and up-to-date profile will also give you a better chance of being recruited by employers.

Indeed

Indeed is one of the job search engines I use regularly and is very easy to use. To start, simply enter the type of job you’re looking for and the desired location. There are a lot of options for refining your results such as by salary estimate, title, company, location and more. You can also save any search as an email alert or subscribe to the RSS feed.

As you can see below, Indeed also has extensive advanced search features.

Yahoo! HotJobs

Many people already know about Yahoo! HotJobs. If you have a Yahoo! account, once logged in you will have the pleasure of seeing recommended jobs for you right on the homepage. Also, just like Indeed you can save your search as en email job alert.

What I like best about HotJobs is that you can hide jobs from certain companies. The only downside to that is that there’s a limit of 20 companies so, you can’t hide anymore than that.

TwitterJobSearch

Since Twitter is growing more popular each day, there’s no surprise that there’s a Twitter job search engine. To start just enter the type of job you’re looking for and location (optional) or, click the “Browse” button up top to browse by category. Jobs are listed as tweets so you can see who tweeted it and when. You then have the option to view the actual job listing, retweet it, or follow the user that tweeted it.

SimplyHired

SimplyHired powers a lot of the job search engines that you can find on numerous social networks such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and Plaxo. Once again, searches can be saved as email alerts or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

SimplyHired goes a step further than Yahoo! Hotjobs with the blocking feature; you can block all jobs from a certain company or from a certain website. The best feature, in my opinion, is the option to allow access to your LinkedIn account. By doing this, you can make connections with others that work at a company you’re applying to.

LinkUp

LinkUp is one of the most unique search engines I’ve seen mainly because everything is done in the same window; no need to open other tabs or windows. After getting your search results, clicking on a listing will open it up a new tab (as pictured below) in the same window, which saves you time and helps reduce screen clutter. You can also apply to jobs right in the same window. From within the LinkUp tabs you can then view other jobs from the same company, view or make connections from LinkedIn (just like SimplyHired) or pick a suggested category.

Craigslist

A well known site for everything from selling items to finding an apartment, Craigslist is also a great site for job hunting. With Craigslist you can search by specific cities and regions.

What I like about Craigslist is that you don’t have to sign up in order to search or respond to listings. Most listings include an email, so applying for a job is as easy as clicking the email link, writing a quick message and attaching your resume. The job section is broken down by categories and you can even subscribe to the RSS feed for a certain category so that you can stay updated on new job listings.

NotchUp

NotchUp is also very unique in that it serves as your own personal career agent. Although it is free to join and use, membership is by application or invitation only. Once you are a member, NotchUp allows you to set a price of what your time is worth and upload your resume. From there, your only job is to sit back and wait to be contacted by potential employers.

Once contacted, these companies will then have to pay you to interview with them. Yes, you heard that right, you get paid to interview for jobs! Applying for membership literally takes 30 seconds, as you can see below there’s not much to fill in.

I wish everyone the best of luck with their job searches. If you know of any other great sites for job hunting please feel free to let us know in the comments.