In today’s competitive employment market, job seekers need to constantly look for new ways to get an edge.
For many people, online job boards like monster.com, indeed.com and even craigslist have become black holes through which companies suck in hundreds of resumes, never to be heard from again.
These job boards are not as effective as they once were even just a few years ago, and savvy job seekers need to employ tools and tactics that will work better for them in a rapidly changing environment.
And one of these might be Career Sonar, a brand new “job discovery website” that is different than anything else out there. After a year of beta testing, Career Sonar launched in mid-January as a job-search platform that not only informs users of what jobs are open in a particular area but also lets them know who in their social networks – LinkedIn and Facebook – is employed there.
In other words, it uses the power of your social network to help you find a job. You no longer have to search through LinkedIn to see who works at a company that has a job opening you’re interested in. Career Sonar does it for you automatically.
How it works:
- Create an account by registering with your email address and creating a password.
- Allow access to your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.
- Type in a relevant job title or key words, which will be saved as your “sonar” and be used to search for job openings, both at the time you first register and when you visit the site in the future.
- Click on the search button, and it will bring up a list of the types of jobs you selected in the area of the country you indicated. Currently Career Sonar only displays jobs in the U.S.
- Add friends to your Career Sonar network, because when a friend joins Career Sonar all of their friends are added as well.
That’s a basic how-to, but here’s how the site works. To the right of each job listing, it shows all of your social media contacts who work at that company currently or did so in the past. It even tells you what their title is, how longed they’ve worked there and when.
If it’s not a first-degree connection, it will tell you who in your network is connected to them. It also ranks the job openings according to which would provide the best opportunities based on the strength of connections to that company through members of your social networks.
Career Sonar is a new concept but one worth trying. It even won the about.com 2013 Reader’s Choice, Best Career Networking Site, beating out LinkedIn and Facebook, among others.
To check it out yourself, visit www.careersonar.com
