Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies
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You can use Google Alerts to your advantage when job searching. Google Alerts is a service from Google that sends you e-mail notifications whenever a topic you’ve specified gets mentioned online.

Here’s how this feature works: Google’s robots scour the web at an incredibly quick pace, finding new content, analyzing it, and indexing it. Google then sends the newly indexed web pages to your e-mail however frequently you choose to be notified. When Google alerts you, you get fresh content in near real time. Essentially, you get an e-mail when something new appears online related to the keyword you’ve set up.

Now that you know what a cool tool Google Alerts is, you can set up alerts for information on potential hiring managers. To modify those instructions for the purpose of getting the scoop on a potential hiring manager, just type the name of your targeted hiring manager in quotation marks rather than your own name.

Create a folder in your e-mail system to keep track of your Google Alerts about each specific hiring manager.

When analyzing the results of your alerts, look for the following information:

  • News items you can mention during an interview or in an e-mail

  • Similarities that you can lead with when you reach out to the person

  • Articles the person has written or was mentioned in so you can congratulate her

  • Red flags so you can determine whether the company is truly a match for you

About This Article

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About the book author:

Joshua Waldman, MBA, is an authority on leveraging social media to find employment. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Huffington Post, Mashable, and the International Business Times. Joshua's career blog, CareerEnlightenment.com, won the About.com Readers' Choice Award for Best Career Blog 2013. Joshua presents keynotes, trainings, and breakout sessions around the world for students, career advisors, and professional organizations.

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