Organizing Data You Gather from Social Networks during Your Job Search

By Joshua Waldman from Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

You need some kind of system for organizing all the data you accumulate about people. After about a week of researching target companies and the hiring managers within those companies, you may find that you have way too much information to keep in your head.

Create dossiers of important people in your network. (A dossier is a file or collection of information about someone.)

Gist: Gist is an innovative, young startup company that has set a trend for social media–based customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Your Gist account collects all your contacts and presents them in a single interface. It also integrates all the social media profiles together. Visiting LinkedIn to find someone only tells you what that person says on LinkedIn, but Gist tells you what one person has said across multiple networks.

Gist also allows you to make notes about people. The program runs an automatic Google News report to tell you whether your targeted people have been in the news. When you print a dossier, all this information is available on a single page.
JobKatch: JobKatch is a job-search organizing platform that keeps records of the opportunities, companies, and people you’re targeting in your campaign. Each contact has a notes section where you can record similarities with yourself, groups joined, and any other data points you need to remember.
Becomed: Becomed is similar to JobKatch, but it looks and feels a bit different. It allows you to rank contacts and categorize them as friends, recruiters, or company contacts. You also can associate web links and documents with each person. As you find companies that are hiring and identify their possible hiring managers, enter them into Becomed to organize your notes.

You may feel like you’re overdoing things by keeping so many notes, but your work will pay off. To avoid kicking yourself for not remembering a crucial fact about a hiring manager that you discovered weeks earlier, make sure you’re organized from the very beginning.