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

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.

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Me:            ”Not now.”

Twitter:     “New Direct Message!”

Me:           “I’ll get to you later.”

LinkedIn   “New Recommendation!”

Me:           “I can’t network right now, I’m working!”

Not to sound cliche, but has this ever happened to you? Between your different social networks, your friends, your colleagues, and that hottie barista at the Starbucks across the street, you can get overwhelmed with all these events. This is “social overload,” a close cousin to the plague known as “information overload”, during which you have no time for socializing, because you’re socializing.

Enter: NutshellMail, a service which currently consolidates messages from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as a huge number of email accounts, packs them up all nice and neat, and sends it all to your primary email, either on demand or on your desired schedule.

Once you’ve opened your account, you’ll have the chance to provide the names and passwords for your various accounts. Go ahead and add as many services as you want, even multiple accounts for a single service. Nutshell will manage them all.

Next, you’ll select the days and times on which to receive an update from Nutshell.

Your updates from NutshellMail will appear much like the above, based on the order you choose. Right now, your Twitter update is limited to the latest 20 updates, which may be sufficient, depending on the size of your follow-list.

You may also update your status or click a small button to ”boomerang” specific email messages to your primary email. This makes for a great way to keep up with a personal account from work, a work account from your personal email, a side account for a spam-trap, or even your child’s email and MySpace accounts (something we’ve had to consider just recently in my home).

At the top of the update message are quick links to request an “Update Now” message, which will send you your most-recent updates, up to the minute.

You may also elect not to receive updates at all, but instead to view all your messages in Nutshell’s inbox, which reminds me of the Outlook Web client.

Fuser is a previously-covered service which is similar to NutshellMail. Here are also five more social aggregators to keep you updated.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. I really must get back to networking.

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Don’t be deceived by the perception that everything you do online appears to be rather unreal or “in game”. All your traces will lead back to you. In the worst case scenario, people you least wish to spot your faults and failures will discover your “other side”. Read on if you’re worried or want to avoid mistakes in the future.

Why you should worry!

Every person with access to the internet knows search engines (e.g. Google) and search engines know you. Search engines naturally collect all the data they can get a hold of. And everyone who knows you may be interested in finding out more about you.

For example your boss or the company you would like to work for or your girlfriend or that stalker who has a crush on you. What are the things they should rather not know about you? Signing up for a dating website for example is harmless, unless your significant other finds out about it. Worried, yet?

How bad is it?

Ever googled your name or your eMail address? Instead of Google you may also try Spock, the people search engine. At Spock you can claim your own results, edit or improve your profile and monitor new information coming in.

So what do these searches reveal? Anything your family or a potential employer may find disturbing? Hopefully not!

Guard yourself!

What can you do to protect your privacy?

Set up an alternative disposable eMail address and use fake name generator to browse incognito. That way you can more or less anonymously engage in private activities that should not be discovered by the wrong people.

Obviously, if you’re using a public computer, make sure you erase all your traces, like cookies, browsing history, passwords, cache etc.

Don’t post intimidating pictures on social networks or anywhere else for that matter, you don’t know who may find them.

Generally, the safest way to stay out of trouble is to avoid trouble. Simply act like the sympathetic and professional person you wish to be perceived as. At least when you’re using your vital data.

Be searchable!

Rather than be completely under the radar and remove all personal information about yourself from the web, you should remain searchable! Because what would be more suspicious than fishy information? No information at all!

Take advantage of the system and do use your real name and your main eMail address in the right places. Make sure people will easily find good things when searching for you and don’t make them dig deep.

For example register a domain or sign up with a career website like Xing or LinkedIn. On these sites you can create the profile you want others to see. Feed it with honest facts about yourself and make connections that matter. Don’t be afraid to mention your private online projects, like websites, forums or blogs, if they are safe and may be relevant for a future career.

What to do when it’s too late?

If information has leaked into the World Wide Web that you would have liked to conceal, it’s almost too late. But you may be able to partially revert the leak and hide it. Is your eMail address pointing to an ugly forum? Go there and change your eMail address. Simply go ahead and tackle the search results one after the other and see what data you can change or remove.

Finally, hope that none of the details were cached. If it’s really bad you may want to hire professionals to help remove information from servers and databases.

Just in case your searches have revealed that someone writes libelous things about you, Ryan recently published a great article about How to Remove False Information about Yourself on the Internet. Good luck!

Need tips for browsing anonymously and removing your traces? Search the MUO article base for safer browsing and privacy.

Picture credits: barunpatro, Hardisty

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FBLook (for FaceBook)

One of the two new products (still in alpha) from Outlook extension developer TechHit. FBLook (Facebook + Outlook) is a simple toolbar add-on that integrates two key factors, (1) changing your “Status” and (2) notifications for friend requests, messages, pokes and more.

OutTwit (for Twitter)

OutTwit (Outlook + Twitter) is a little more robust than FBLook. With OutTwit you can update your Twitter status, receive friend updates, check messages, assign categories to messages, shorten URLs with TinyURL and archive/search your messages.

Next, let’s move onto the the little more robust and advanced Outlook add-ons.

LinkedIn – Outlook Toolbar

The first from LinkedIn is a toolbar, but it heavily integrates with Outlook. The simple and advanced features include; updating your Outlook contacts with LinkedIn profile information, receive notifications of profile changes, one click invites, mini-profiles in the emails, updates for your “network” and more. If you really use LinkedIn and have Outlook this is a must have.

Plaxo – Outlook Add-on

Similar Outlook add-on comes from Plaxo. Plaxo actually has slight integration with LinkedIn and you are easily able to add your LinkedIn friends to Plaxo, so it’s all a matter of which you prefer (or both). With Plaxo’s new Outlook add-on with Pulse, the new “social stream”, which integrates your “Connection’s” streams from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, etc., makes Outlook your ultimate source for following your friends and news. Like LinkedIn’s add-on, it keeps your address book up to date, but Plaxo’s also syncs your calendar, tasks and notes. This could come in handy to synchronize multiple Outlooks or even multiple calendars, like Yahoo or Google.

Xobni

Xobni, which is still in private beta, but has released plenty of more invites, is a social Outlook add-on without a social network behind it. I’ve been using Xobni for several months now and I love the integration and search functions. Any email I click on, Xobni will bring up:

• nr.of emails that were sent and received from the email address (which determines their rank)
• list of all email conversations (better than Gmail)
• a list of all the attachments for the person
• broken down timelines of when I usually send/receive emails to/from that person
• automatically pulls the phone number from an email
• and the best feature is the almost instantaneous search function.

You can sign up now for an invite here.

FreeConference

Finally, I have to schedule conference calls several times a week. FreeConference, is the simplest and quickest way to setup a free conference call. There are paid options, but I’ve never used them. Just recently they updated their offerings with an Outlook add-on that is literally 3 clicks away from within Outlook to setup a conference call. Clicking “Schedule a Conference” brings up a Calendar Appointment with all the details, select your invitees, and hit send. All the information is automatically included with the calendar appointment.

I love Outlook and I love integration, is there something else out there for free I should be using?

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