How to Use Becomed, JibberJobber, and CareerShift in Your Job Search

By Joshua Waldman from Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

Becomed, JibberJobber, and CareerShift are job-search organization tools that can help you as you search for a job via social media. Becomed bills itself as your job-search assistant. You can create specific job-search goals for yourself, such as how many applications you send a week or how many interviews you go to in a week.

Then Becomed tells you where you stand against your goal as well as how you stand against other users (that’s one way to stay motivated!). As you enter job descriptions, link contacts, and upload documents, Becomed suggests possible next steps on your search. If you have a lot of contacts and job opportunities to keep track of, using Becomed is a great way to stay organized.

Many unemployment offices require some kind of proof that you’re making an effort to find work. As long as you’re tracking your activities in Becomed, you can print a report that most unemployment offices accept as proof of your efforts.

Jason Alba started JibberJobber in 2006 and can claim development of the first online job-search platform. By far, JibberJobber offers job seekers the most comprehensive set of tools for managing relationships, job searches, and careers. Here are just some of the features JibberJobber offers:

Contact management tools so you can import contacts, see where they are in a map, and even show interrelationships between contacts
A database of companies so you can quickly import target organizations or recruiters
Job application management as well as job board RSS feeds so you can track the progress you make for each job
Custom report building so you can take a summary view of your job search efforts or report to an unemployment office
Interview preparation database so you can record questions you may be asked and how you plan to respond
A library of articles and books, which you can download from or contribute to
A log for your job-search expenses with a built-in budgeting tool to help you stay frugal during your hunt

If you recently graduated from college, you may recognize CareerShift because it supports many colleges’ career centers as well as individual accounts. One of CareerShift’s most impressive features is its job-board aggregation service. You can search every major job board from right inside your account, and the database is frequently updated with the newest opportunities.

The stunning value of CareerShift is that it actually tells you who you need to meet at each company, along with e-mail addresses and phone numbers for those people. This feature saves you hours of research identifying key hiring managers.

CareerShift also provides document management (so you can organize your résumés and cover letters) and campaign management (so you can keep track of which companies you’ve applied to). It also has a robust calendar feature that helps you track what you need to do each day of your job search.