A Career Developer's Notes, by Bill Bell, CDP

Building a Better Job Feed: indeed.ca and eluta.ca Together

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:41:00 +0000

First of all, I'm indebted to Bryan Webb for making me a little more aware of what people want from job sites(!): (a) They would rather search two than ten! (b) eluta and indeed make one good choice of those two. Let me show you how to make a feed that combines the results from these two sites. You can have your feed either in the form of email or as RSS suitable for, say, the Google Reader.

You'll need a Yahoo! login. With that you can go to Yahoo! Pipes where you can create a pipe that looks like this.

For now just select the two YQL modules and the Union module and connect them with the Pipe Output module. Now open the eluta.ca advanced search form in a separate tab or window. Indicate the types of job advertisements required and where those jobs must be, then click on 'Find Jobs'. Right-click on the RSS feed button and use the menu to copy the underlying link. Now return to the pipes display and copy the eluta URL into the YQL module and add the remainder of the YQL statement (the "select *" stuff and the enclosing double quotes). Now open the indeed.ca advanced search form and do the same thing with its RSS feed URL in the pipes display. You now have a complete pipe that combines eluta.ca and indeed.ca.

Make a trial run of your new pipe and save it. You can now go back to your page of feeds and can elect to add your new pipe, as a feed, to your chosen feed reader. However, if you do not use a feed reader just proceed now to process your feed with FeedBurner.

Open FeedBurner in a separate tab or window. Copy your feed from your Pipes display page into the FeedBurner box labelled "Burn a feed right this instant." and follow the remaining steps. You now have a source of email that combines alerts for your choice of jobs, for the geographical area you selected.

A More Efficient Form of indeed.ca, II

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:36:00 +0000

In a recent posting I showed how to build a composite feed consisting of three job feeds from indeed.ca for Hamilton, Niagara Falls and St Catha-rines, Ontario with duplicate ads filtered out. Then I used Yahoo! Alerts to generate emails in place of the output from the RSS feed.

Somebody on LinkedIn told me that he doesn't like using Yahoo! Alerts (for reasons I won't go into here), which led me to explore other ways of turning RSS feeds into email. I had long forgotten FeedBurner but it actually yields a more elegant solution in combination with a web page. I used Google sites to host the thingy that FeedBurner makes. The advantage is that there is no need for copying anything from one web page to another. The user just registers heris email address with the FeedBurner page. This is how it appears.

Go here to subscribe yourself.

Résumé: Basic Advice, Right on Target

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:59:00 +0000

To be really blunt, I'm bored silly reading the same advice about résumés over and over again. What's more, no matter how long-winded I may be myself, I prefer economy in the writings of others. So I delight in finding places where many or most of the basics of writing serviceable résumés are set down within a few paragraphs.

Here's one I just found: the Élite Résumés Blog section.

A More Efficient Form of indeed.ca

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:54:00 +0000

There's little doubt that indeed.ca is a great way of identifying job leads. Nonetheless it's results can be improved upon in some ways and I'll describe one in this posting.

Suppose you live in the Niagara Peninsula. Then you would be interested in job advertisements posted on indeed.ca for the Hamilton, Niagara and St Catharines areas. Now you could simply arrange to be kept informed about these areas as individual job alerts. However, the likelihood is that you would receive duplicate advertisements. For the purposes of this article--to keep it simple--let's assume that you want to see all advertisements. This would have the advantage that you would avoid missing opportunities.

I am going to describe how to set up a Yahoo 'Pipe' to get just one feed for the three areas, without duplicate ads. If you just want to know how to use the pipe then just cut to the chase scene (below).

This is the complete diagram for my pipe at pipes.yahoo.com. The three boxes on the left represent feeds from indeed.ca, one each for Hamilton, Niagara and St Catharines respectively. To obtain the URLs I visited the corresponding pages at indeed.ca, then copied and pasted the URLs from the RSS feed buttons.

The three feeds are merged in the Union widget, then sorted on job titles. Then the Unique widget discards duplicate ads based on the guid in the merged feed.

The Chase Scene

Most people stay clear of feeds. Do you? No problem! Here's how to receive bunches of ads as email.

In a separate browser tab or window open Yahoo! Alerts.
Select 'Feed/Blog.'
Copy this URL into the edit box at 'A': http://bit.ly/3JSC8D
Select how often you want to receive alerts and indicate your email address.
Save your alert.

Good hunting!

A Must Watch: Anyone Interested in Education or Entrepreneurship

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:09:00 +0000

See the Psychology Today article at "Teaching Kids to Cheat". About an hour long but worth every minute.

Jobs for Career Developers: Woops

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:05:00 +0000

I experienced a system failure recently. As part of the recovery process I upgraded the version of the principal development language that I use—Python—to 2.6.

Things broke. Among them several scripts I use to produce the job listings for CDPs.

Sorry about that. That aspect of my life seems to be back to normal now. Please let me know if you notice anything amiss.

Maybe I should mention my indebtedness to the developers of jQuery for their product. I used it for the little HTML signature maker. They made a trivial item even easier to create.

email Signatures: Good Place to Advertise, II

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:35:00 +0000

If you use one of the webmail systems such as Gmail then wisestamp makes it easy to create and include simple or fancy HTML signatures in your outgoing messages. You can even put a picture in or a link to the most recent item in your blog. You need to be using the Firefox browser. Worth trying.

Beware Those Monster RSS Feeds

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:15:00 +0000

I'm working with a client who's an automotive technician with about a decade's experience. He lives in Scarborough. He's definitely computer savvy and I told him I'd give him some RSS job ad feeds. Because lots of terms are used for automotive technicians in Monster job ads I avoided using an approach involving them to identify jobs for my client.(1) Because so many of the available jobs are geographically concentrated in the Toronto (and, hence, Scarborough) area I also decided to avoid refining my search on this dimension for fear of losing any that might be of interest to him.

In the end Monster showed me 37 jobs ads. I pressed the RSS feed button and subscribed to the resulting feed in Google Reader.

Seven (7) ads.

Where were the other 30? I inquired on Monster's support line and "Roosevelt" explained that one receives only those postings that appear after one subscribes to the RSS feed. As a matter of fact, I don't think that this can be quite accurate as an explanation because some of the job ads in the feed were amongst those that I identified in the search. However, support lines are not the place to argue, are they? The real point is that it's important to make whatever use one can of all of the jobs in the search listing before beginning to rely on those in the Monster RSS feed.

Oh, and incidentally, the Job Bank seems to get it right. I'm making an RSS feed for my client for the Job Bank too, obviously. I noticed that the both the search and the corresponding RSS feed for him yielded 72 job ads. Nice.

(1) Why do most Big Boards fail to code jobs? It's not as if there aren't a number of perfectly good coding schemes. And, if they don't want to ask employers to use those then, why can't they incorporate some up-to-date natural language processing? Failing that, why encourage term-based searching for clients when even professional users of Boolean strings, like recruiters, find them a challenge?

email Signatures: Good Place to Advertise

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:41:00 +0000

Your email goes to many, many people. Why not use it as a medium for advertising links to your blog, to your LinkedIn profile and to your website?

For many people the stumbling block to having a signature with live links is creating a file that contains HTML (the web language). Let's assume for a moment that you have such a file, and that you use Outlook Express as your mailer, as I think most people do. Then open the Tools | Options dialogue and complete it more or less as shown here.

You will need to click on 'New' to add a signature, select the 'File' radio button, and then use Browse to identify the file that contains the HTML. If you use a different mailer then I would say check its help file for support information or use Google. I hope no-one minds if I mention here that I really like the Thunderbird mailer. One of its advantages is that it will use either a plain signature file or an HTML signature depending on whether the message in which the signature is to be included is plain or contains HTML.

But how do you create the HTML? Again, there is an enormous amount of advice available via Google. However, in my opinion applying a lot of it requires significant knowledge of HTML. This morning I decided to write something that would provide basic signatures yet require no knowledge of HTML. It's offered in the right column of this blog.

Here's how it looks and how it's meant to be used.

The rectangular boxes constitute a form and they are pre-filled to give you an idea of what goes into them. For example, unless your name is Phineas McFoggerty you would replace that entry with your own name. In the line that has 'B.A., B.D., ...' you can put your job title, your many degrees and diplomas or your business associations--anything you like. Whatever you put here will appear on a second line in the signature.

There are four pairs of items that will be turned into links. For example the last one will appear as Me on Twitter and will point to the link that appears in the righthand edit box. In each pair you should change the item on the left to something that is readable to a human being. It will become the visible label for a link. Change the item on the right to the corresponding, complete URL.

For example, in my case I might replace 'My blog' with "Blog: A Career Developer's Notes" and the URL to the right of this with

http://unsymptomatictoo.blogspot.com/

(that you see at the top of this page). If you don't need to have four links in your signature just blank out all of the lines (both items in each line) that you don't need.

Then press 'Show HTML'. Now copy the HTML that appears into a file using an editor. Notepad will do as the editor and save the file where you can find it. Now go back to the first part of this blog item where telling your mailer about using a signature file is discussed.

If something here is unclear please comment.

Psychological Therapy

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:25:00 +0000

Although CDPs as such are neither trained nor qualified to provide psychological therapy it would be as well for us all to be aware that empirically supported techniques are available where they are needed. Here's a source that provides links to some other authoritative items: “Therapy that works: Why so many psychologists choose to ignore science.”

With thanks to fellow Twitterer psydir.

Job Ads for CDPs (update)

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:30:00 +0000

The 'Job Ads for CDPs' linked somewhere in the righthand column of this blog now lists jobs from COSTI in Toronto. There's one there for a job developer. Thanks to Patricia Martin of Career Essentials for the tip.

3 October: I’m dropping the separate COSTI listing because the jobs are already included in another listing. Hadn’t noticed that.

Doing the Wrong Thing (When You're Stressed)

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:18:00 +0000

Thanks to fellow Twitterer @WRY999 I've just read Dr Marsh Lucas’ blog item, “The Toothpaste-Tube Wars: Relationship Battles and the Brain,” suggesting mindfulness meditation as a way of exercising my brain to modulate my reactions to stressful situations. She promises to write more about mindfulness in future.

I Know How To Do The Wrong Thing

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:14:00 +0000

A few years ago a lady with an accent unlike my own interviewed me for a job by telephone. I wasn't thrilled about this because, as far as I am concerned, telephone conversations are only a little better than conversations conducted using email or instant messaging. They provide only the scarcest of cues about one's conversational partner, or about his or her surroundings. And this was a job interview. I found myself struggling to gather as much information from auditory cues as I could, and I could feel my stress level rising. However, eventually this agony was coming to an end and I thanked the interviewer. Except that my voice came out in something resembling the interviewer's own accent.

I can laugh heartily now, especially since I have just read that this failure of our cognitive systems is not altogether unusual. In fact, rehearsing what we see when these failures occurs is the basis of some kinds of humour. Enjoy: How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion.

But now you are saying: OK, Bill, what can we do about it? To a question like that, let me give you a firm "I'm not altogether sure."

I do not think that suppressing the untoward thoughts will help. Suppressing them might actually make them more likely to intrude. The most promising approach that I know of involves what has been called "mindfulness." I don't need to say much because there's a collection of videos on youtube that you can watch.

Here's one that I like: Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn. You can poke around on youtube for items that might appeal to you more.

If you do try this approach I'd be very interested in hearing how well it works for you.

Now This is the Truth

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:36:00 +0000

“Some of these recommendations seem like they are common sense, but they are just not that common. People don’t have strategies, they don’t assess their plans, and they don’t think about their strategies and reflect on whether it’s working or how to make them work better. They just don’t do it,”

Daniel Turban, professor and chair of the Department of Management, University of Missouri.

Read the full article, Staying Positive Helps in Job Search.

Possible Future Directions

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:18:00 +0000

Technological innovations of various kinds have made short production runs of many items economical for some time now. For example, you can place an order for a single copy of a book to be printed. Presumably this trend will continue.

Here's a video that mentions a few related trends that will inevitably result in occupations for some people—evanescent though those jobs may prove to be. Think open source hardware, solid printing, and so on.

Note, incidentally, that this is an example of an Ignite presentation. On 27 November there will be an evening of them in Waterloo, Ontario.

Landing a Job: Four People ... Continuing with this line of thought

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:14:00 +0000

Someone asked for my advice about changing careers a couple of days ago. She wanted suggestions about how she could use her experience in one field to gain an entry-level job in a related field.

Most clients won't use advice of the kind I'm about to offer. (But you're far too polite to ask me why I continue to give it, right?) My advice was for her to watch the video in the previous posting on this blog to identify suitable candidates for interviews and then to rebrand herself. Here it is in a little more detail.

The first suggestion I offered was that she watch the video, identify at least one person in each of these rôles, in the kinds of organisations in which she wants to work, and then ask each of these individuals for their advice about what they prefer or demand in candidates. The usual game plans for information interviews would apply: no job solicitation, go prepared with questions, etc.

With the results of her interviews in hand I suggested that she take a critical look at her own qualifications and think creatively about how she could rebrand herself. She was to look at each requirement that she had learned about and to write a description of herself, using some combination of her own abilities, skills, aptitudes, qualifications, etc that approximated it.

Then I added that, before she did any of this, she should see if she could find out whether there are enough jobs in her target occupation to make all this worth her effort.

Perhaps the following message belongs in every blog entry about finding a job: The single most likely thing that will happen when you submit a job application to an employer is NOTHING. Not only is this discouraging, it is uninformative; it tells you nothing about why you lost the opportunity. The time to do your learning about the employer, about the market, about yourself, about everything necessary to grab the job, is before you apply for it. There is little profit in post mortems. Trust me.

Landing a Job: Four People Who Need to be Convinced in Employer Organisation

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:48:00 +0000

Blog Item for Over-40 Job Search

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:48:00 +0000

Can you tell, just looking at my photo, that I'm over forty? Be honest now.

Anyway, in the gruesome circumstances foisted upon me by all-too-rapidly advancing age I take special interest in stuff with titles like 100 Tips & Tools For Job-Hunters Over 45. Pretty good list.

Brought to my attention by Mr. Arash Ahmadi on a LinkedIn group. Have I mentioned that LinkedIn is good for you?

Google Chief Economist: Statistics Becoming More Important

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:27:00 +0000

Google's Chief Economist is Hal Varian. Hear him interviewed 15 minutes into this radio programme in the BBC Math series “More or Less”.

Document Design Course from Carnegie Mellon University

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:13:00 +0000

A résumé is a document.

Here's a free, online course called “Visual Communication Design” from Carnegie Mellon about designing documents. Although the blurb for the course says that it’s about technical documents almost everything in it applies to résumés.

The Internet is Killing Stuff

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:46:00 +0000

Glance over 50 things that are being killed by the internet from the Telegraph's site and notice number 28 particularly. Now if people think they can second guess physicians based on what they read on the ‘net what does this tell you about how life must change for career developers?

If, like me, you found the other 49 items interesting too, what can trends can we predict on behalf of our clients? Obviously:

Businesses that dispense information in any of its forms—sound, video, money, insurance, books, betting slips, news, and so on—must adapt.
The kinds of information gathering, storing and processing abilities and skills that a person or organisation is valued for are changing.
We will expect to store information differently.
We will expect games and amusements to be much more complicated.
The boundary between work time and personal time might become less distinct.

What else?

YOU are a business

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:41:00 +0000

Apologies for shouting. I'm not the first to make this observation either, right? Nowadays each of us is like a little business. Each of us, like it or not, is responsible for marketing and managing him- or herself as a business enterprise.

In this connection here is the KickStart scorecard, a self-assessment for use by business that was devised by a Canadian marketing agency, MarketingMasters. The value in it for career developers is that it serves as a checklist of the areas that an individual, single-person ‘business’ must consider to be successful.

I couldn’t resist thinking through how the items translate. Can you? Give me your thoughts in the comments, will you? I'll mention what I think in another posting.

Incidentally my thanks are due to fellow twitterer @hjarche who made me aware of the American Express Idea Hub where I found an article by Elizabeth Walker of Marketing Masters.

Internet Problems for the Past Few Days

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Someone in my neighbourhood cut a telephone cable whilst mowing his lawn a few days ago and the consequence for me was the loss of both telephone land line and internet services. Without those I was unable to keep the job listings up to date.

I'm sorry about that, and hope it didn't cause too much trouble for anyone.

Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:55:00 +0000

First of all, exploit all of the tips available at “How To ‘Maximize’ The Potential of LinkedIn”. It's an excellent article.

Additionally:

See my postings here and here about the specifics of selecting a good LinkedIn public profile URL.
When you visit your LinkedIn profile take note of the green BlogLink widget. Use it to make your own blog postings appear in your LinkedIn profile. Get extra mileage!
Career Development Practitioners should note that there is a CDP group on LinkedIn as well as the Career Professionals Network. If you have more specialised interests then you can easily create your own group, perhaps one for your own geographical area. The beauty of this is that any group on LI is permeable. When you network with someone in your own area the benefits for the two of you permeate beyond the group of which you are both members.

If you notice other ways of using LI I hope you will comment here.

Who Can Resist a Psychometric Test?

wbell@vex.net (Bill Bell) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:53:00 +0000

The temptation to give this result a place of enduring prominence on my blog was, of course, enormous. However, I have finally decided that it might not be of lasting interest to my readers and, therefore, I'm putting it in its own blog entry.

How outrageous a nerd are you? Only 22% of the human race is more nerdy than I am.