• Have the job description, your resume, and your cover letter printed out or in front of you. Take some time beforehand to highlight the experiences and qualities that you want to be sure to hit on in the interview, and refer to these while you’re chatting.
• Know your strengths and weaknesses. Write out your three strongest selling points, and your three weaknesses — with an answer to how that weakness can be improved or leveraged.
• Have questions for the interviewers written down, and take notes as others come up in the conversation.

Of course, don’t be reading something you’ve written already - they’ll know you sound rehearsed. Bullet points will keep you on track.

2. Get dressed up. Okay, you don’t have to go all out business attire, but if you’re at home, wear something nice that will put you in the “work” mindset and keep you feeling sharp.

3. Just because they can’t see it doesn’t mean they can’t hear it. Don’t be eating, chewing gum, or smoking while you’re on the phone. It’s fine to have a glass of water around just like you would in a normal interview.

4. Find a quiet place. You wouldn’t believe how many people having yelling kids, barking dogs, nearby traffic and other distractions around when they’re doing phone interviews. Not only will these be a distraction to your train of thought and presentation, but they could make you feel apologetic or embarrassed to the interviewer, which isn’t a psychological place you want to be in when you’re selling yourself.

5. Enunciate and speak deliberately. Because you can’t read the interviewers’ facial expressions, it’s easy to start doubting whether they’re still with you and to speed up your answers. Take your time, be deliberate, and finish each thought.

6. Make sure you have phone service, or use a landline. With most people speaking on cell phones, calls can drop easily - creating an awkward break in the conversation and more uncertainty. If you are having trouble hearing the interviewer, tell them - there’s no point in going through an interview where you can’t understand what they’re asking just because you feel embarrassed to call it out.

7. Get follow up contact information. You’ll want to send a thank you note, so be sure you have an email address of whoever you spoke with.

Any other advice? Feel free to share it in the comments section!

Image: marybethlafferty.com

Like many jobseekers, we’ve seen how search processes have become jumbled over the past year - creating potentially negative experiences for candidates and companies alike. We’ve written on this topic a couple times ourselves - “How Green Companies Can Clean Up Their Hiring Processes” for GreenBiz, and more recently, “The Dangers of Haphazard Hiring” for Triple Pundit.

We came across another great article on this topic from Commongood Careers and thought we’d share it. Great advice on how to create a healthier, more productive hiring process.

Avoiding 10 Common Search Pitfalls

By Commongood Careers

There are a number of ways that recruiting and hiring processes can go wrong, and hiring the right people into the right positions is too important to leave to chance. There are a number of common mistakes that can be easily avoided by utilizing some basic hiring best practices.

(1) Taking Shortcuts with Planning: Make sure that you have dedicated the appropriate amount of time to planning your search before beginning the process. Too often, organizations need someone hired “yesterday” and jump into the process by throwing a poorly developed job posting up on a random smattering of job boards. Instead, take some time to identify exactly what you are looking for in the role, make sure that all decision makers are involved at the outset and that all stages of the recruiting and hiring process have been outlined in advance. These steps will help you focus the search, keep it on schedule, ensure that everyone involved is aware of his or her role, and increase the chances of a successful hire.

(2) Defining Positions Poorly: It has been said that if you don’t know what “treasure” looks like, you can dig in the sand all day without knowing whether or not you have found it. So too with searches, it is essential to fully think through the nature of the role and its responsibilities, as well as the experience, skills and personality of the ideal candidate. This structure should not prevent you from exploring “out of the box” candidates and reevaluating your initial assumptions throughout the search, but it will give you a consistent standard to which all candidates can be equitably compared.

(3) Searching for a “Unicorn”: Whenever possible, define a position that is realistic and an ideal candidate profile that exists in more than a handful of people. Are you looking for a set of skills and competencies that often do not co-exist within one person? Recognize that if you go forward, your search may be challenging and may not lead to a successful hire without concessions being made. Consider recasting the position into something more realistic and test your job description with colleagues and peers to ensure that it is reasonable and clearly communicates the nature of the role.

(4) Setting Unrealistic Salary Constraints: Make sure that the salary range you have designated for the position matches the requirements and experience level you are seeking. Again, if you move forward with a misalignment in this area, such as looking for someone with 15 years of senior experience who wants to work full-time for $32,000; then your search may be slow and frustrating. Almost as challenging as low salary expectations are excessively narrow salary bands. For most searches, it is appropriate to have a $10,000 salary range for entry/mid-level jobs and a $20,000 range for senior roles. Going into a search with too narrow a budget may be a fiscal necessity, but it can also constrain your ability to consider a range of candidates and limit your room for negotiation.

(5) Making Insufficient Recruitment Efforts: It is best to use a broad variety of tools and resources to generate the largest and most diverse pool of candidates. Posting an ad to one or two job boards is generally insufficient. Make sure you tap “active” jobseekers through advertising as well as “passive” jobseekers through robust outreach to your personal and professional networks. A common mistake is to move in a gradual and staged approach, escalating efforts after initial postings have failed to produce results. It is best to be aggressive from the start and make a big splash with your hiring announcement.

(6) Losing Momentum: Recognize that searches follow a cycle and ensure that your search does not lose valuable momentum. There is usually a lot of energy at the beginning of a search, as staff members imagine bringing on great new talent and as initial postings bring an early rush of candidates. As the search goes on, however, people’s energy may wane as your colleagues realize how much time a search can take and as the number of new candidates begins to diminish. It is the hiring manager’s job to make sure that energy and results carry through until the successful completion of the search. This includes re-posting ads, re-mining networks, reviewing candidates efficiently and keeping the team informed.

(7) Lacking Respect for Candidates: Put yourself in your candidates’ shoes and make sure that you are treating them in the way you would want to be treated at every stage of the process. Think things through from confirming application receipt, to the timing and nature of correspondence about their status and the process, to making offers and communicating regrets. Recruiting is a marketing opportunity as well as a means to a hire. Remember that for any given position, only 1 person will be hired, but the other 50-100 individuals could become donors, board members, community partners, or future hires for other roles. Keep all candidate information in a database if possible.

(8) Conducting Weak Reference Checks: Don’t underestimate the power of reference checking. Too many organizations are so exhausted by the time they identify a strong candidate and are so anxious to “close the deal” that they overlook the incredible value of learning from others about their top candidate’s past performance. It certainly can be frustrating when you learn that your top candidate is not going to be the right fit for your position, but it is much more advantageous, both emotionally and financially, to come to that conclusion before the hire is made than two or six months later. Remember also that advice from references can be helpful even as you work to on-board and manage new hires.

(9) Hiring at the Wrong Pace: Don’t hire too quickly. It is important to resist the tendency to let your urgency to fill a position lead to an abbreviated process that lacks rigor and consistency. Similarly, don’t hire too slowly. Make sure that your process moves efficiently through the different stages, and resist the urge to “hold out” for an even better candidate to come along. This latter strategy often leads to a prolonged or unsuccessful search. Knowing in advance what you are looking for and holding to those standards will help you identify a candidate who will meet your needs.

(10) Failing to Document: Be careful what you write down during a search, but maintain a confidential file of each candidate’s application materials, the dates at which they moved through the different stages in the process, and the reasons why they were advanced or declined. This will help protect you in case of any allegations of inappropriate hiring practices, and also creates an invaluable resource of candidates for similar future searches.

Penned by Christina and Carolyn

At Bright Green Talent, we’re all in favor of not taking things too seriously and making sure there’s always enough laughter going around. Thus, we recently headed out to an amateur stand-up comedy night at a local club. During the show, we realized that there were some real overlaps in the Venn Diagram of stand-up comedy and interviewing…

Here’s what we came up with to help you avoid those moments of scattered, forced laughter (or blank stares) from the crowd:

10. Know your audience and cater to them. If you’re in a room full of women, don’t make sexist jokes.  Same goes for an interview or cover letter - figure out what you can say that will resonate with the reader.  Sensitivity and judgment will go a long way in warming the interviewer up to you; lack thereof will quickly get you blacklisted.

9. Just the right amount of eye contact… Not too much and definitely not too little!  In an interview, don’t look up or out the window too much when you’re considering a question…better to look down at your notes. We’ve had people disqualified for jobs because of wandering gazes.

8. Energy! The comedians who were too loud and energetic for the crowd seemed overbearing; those who were lethargic seemed like they were unprepared, nervous or just didn’t care.  Find the right balance of energy between sluggish and overzealous so that you can express both your passion and your composure.

7. Be confident and natural in what you are saying. Sounding too rehearsed will not bode well.  If you give canned answers that mirror your resume or cover letter exactly, it can appear as though you have no more to offer than what they already read about you in the application.  (Though practice does make perfect in this case - “mock interviewing” with friends is one of the most effective ways to prepare for an interview.)

6. Be concise. Know where the story is going and get there!  (With the appropriate tangents along the way…) For the comedian, if it’s obvious that your joke isn’t funny to the audience, don’t beat a dead horse — change tacks.  This goes for interviewing too — if something you’re trying to express about your experience or passion is drawing blank stares (or worse, offended looks), carefully exit from that strand of conversation and strike out in a new, hopefully more successful, direction.

5. Timing is everything. Hey, delivery matters.  Just look at Jon Stewart.

4. Incorporate others only as much as they want to be incorporated.  Actually, this comparison doesn’t actually work: Interviews are considered successful when they are a conversation between two people rather than drawing a clear distinction between interviewer and interviewee.  Whereas for a comedian, the audience may prefer to be passive and that’s okay!

3. Work with whatever makes you, you. The best and most successful comedians are those with a memorable, distinctive style which they have made “work” for them.  This is true for the rest of us as well.  Know your strengths and quirks and make them work for you.

2. Don’t be negative about previous employers. At this show, we saw an elementary-school-principal-by-day reference how ridiculous her students and parents were — with a fair number of expletives laced in — while her husband was enthusiastically filming the performance.  We couldn’t help but think if that video ever got in the “wrong” hands of her colleagues, school parents, or anyone else, she would likely lose her job and her reputation would take a serious hit.  There is never a need to un-constructively criticize an organization just to prove dedication to a job opportunity; rather, emphasize the things you would change and how you think the experience has prepared you to contribute to a new organization.

1. If you make people laugh, that is a very good sign! Interviews can be tense situations.  If you find that you have a good enough rapport with your interviewer, finding some (appropriate!) humor can take the edge off and make you seem poised, confident and likeable…all good things when they are evaluating whether they want to work with you!

Image: http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/

An article in NYTimes yesterday (”More Employers Use Social Networks to Check Out Applicants“) shared this flurry of statistics about how potential employers are finding you all over the internet:

“According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The study, which questioned 2,667 managers and human resource workers, found that 35 percent of employers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site…

The report showed that Facebook was the most popular online destination for employers to do their online sleuthing, followed by LinkedIn and MySpace. In addition, 7 percent followed job candidates on Twitter.

More than half of the employers who participated in the survey said that provocative photos were the biggest factor contributing to a decision not to hire a potential employee, while 44 percent of employers pinpointed references to drinking and drug use as red flags.”

Tips to avoid being on the wrong side of these statistics:

• As we’ve always said, google yourself thoroughly and see what potential employers are finding. Run a google image search as well.
• Set up a Google alert on your name
• Protect your Twitter updates.
• Jazz up your Facebook security settings.
• De-tag incriminating photos
• Check out this past blog post with other tips on hiding your indiscretions

Nick shared his two cents with Times reporter Kate Galbraith about the value of sustainability-focused programs:

“Amid all the growth, experts warn prospective students to take a hard look at the value for money offered by the courses. At some schools, “there is a very large gap between the theory that they’re teaching and the actual requirements of the field,” particularly the financial and technical aspects of sustainability, said Nick Ellis, a managing partner at Bright Green Talent, an environmentally oriented executive search firm in San Francisco. He advises asking prospective schools about their placement rates in various green industries.”

Here’s the full article:

Sustainability Field Booms on Campus

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

BACK TO CLASS Bob Gressens signed up for continuing education at two universities to learn more about clean technology.

After 25 years in the high-technology industry, Bob Gressens sensed a growing excitement over environmental issues — and a new business opportunity. He followed his instinct, quit his job and went back to school.

“I want to give the next 15 years or whatever to sustainability,” he said. “To give back.”

In May, Mr. Gressens, who lives in San Francisco, began taking courses on topics as diverse as green building and sustainability management at the extension school of the University of California, Berkeley. He also signed up for additional coursework at a continuing studies program run by Stanford. If all goes well, he will find a job with an electrical utility, or elsewhere in the clean-technology field, after finishing his courses.

Mr. Gressens’s trajectory will sound familiar at educational institutions across the country, whose continuing education arms have seen a striking influx of students interested in the relatively new field of sustainability. At Harvard’s extension school, enrollment in environmental courses has soared by more than 70 percent in two years, according to the university, which has responded with new offerings in fast-changing fields like carbon neutrality and environmental economics.

Berkeley recorded a similar surge: three years ago, the sustainability studies office offered just five courses; today it includes 60 courses over a wide-ranging curriculum. Since 2006, enrollment has grown to more than 400 students per semester, from 55.

“In spite of the recession, we’re seeing strong interest in subject areas such as sustainable buildings, transportation, energy, economic policies and, of course, LEED,” said Pat Rose, the media relations manager of the Berkeley extension school, referring to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a certification system established by the United States Green Building Council. Being “LEED certified” has become important for professionals in fields including architecture and law; Mr. Gressens will be taking the LEED exam this fall.

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education is just starting to survey whether colleges are offering continuing education courses related to sustainability, and not all are doing so. However, “we do have a sense from our members that these types of courses have increased in the past few years,” Paul Rowland, the group’s executive director, said in an e-mail message.

Many sustainability-focused continuing education programs offer certificates to students completing a certain number of courses. (At least four courses are needed for a certificate at Berkeley, for example, and 10 full-day workshops at the University of Oregon’s sustainability leadership program.) A few offer degrees, including the Harvard extension school, which confers a master’s in sustainability and environmental management.

Courses at Berkeley generally cost hundreds of dollars; at Harvard, they may reach $950 for noncredit attendees.

Business schools are also burnishing their sustainability credentials. A few, like Duquesne University’s business school in Pittsburgh and, as of this fall, City University of Seattle, offer M.B.A.’s in sustainability. Every two years, the Center for Business Education at the nonprofit Aspen Institute ranks the top M.B.A. programs with a social or environmental bent. The public management program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business tops the 2007-8 list; the next survey is due out in October.

For homeowners who want to learn about energy-saving options, some institutions offer hands-on programs. The College of Continuing and Professional Education at California State University, Long Beach, has scheduled a three-hour workshop for later this month; attendees take along their utility bills for discussion. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the continuing education arm offers workshops in straw-bale building and green remodeling. (This fall, its sustainable practices program, in conjunction with the university’s business school, will offer a program in sustainable management.)

Many universities are directing their programs toward managers, but another booming niche — occupied mainly by community colleges — involves training renewable energy technicians. Christine Real de Azua, a spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association, said more than 100 such programs were in operation around the country, at least 80 created in the last two years.

Amid all the growth, experts warn prospective students to take a hard look at the value for money offered by the courses. At some schools, “there is a very large gap between the theory that they’re teaching and the actual requirements of the field,” particularly the financial and technical aspects of sustainability, said Nick Ellis, a managing partner at Bright Green Talent, an environmentally oriented executive search firm in San Francisco. He advises asking prospective schools about their placement rates in various green industries.

Mr. Gressens, 53, said he was happy with what he was learning at Berkeley and Stanford. And he cited another advantage of the courses: the students.

At Berkeley, “you have people whose passion is to save the planet,” he said. “There are others who are just looking to make a buck. So that makes things interesting.”

[Also check out another article published today, "Ranking Universities by Greenness" to find the best of these programs.]

A recent NYTimes article highlighted yet another dark side of the recession -”Job Search Firms: Big Pitches and Fees, Few Jobs” explained how companies are trying to exploit the panic jobseekers are feeling with scams and offers to “guarantee” a job for a chunk of money.

What these companies are targeting is people’s desire to find a job immediately - which makes a lot of sense, given that bills need to get paid.

In the green sector, there are a lot of factors contributing to the reality that green jobs growth is happening by fits and starts and is hard to predict: companies are seeing funding wash in and out, start-ups that are hitting it big or failing to meet expectations, and stimulus funding is creating buzz.

As we’ve seen it in recent months, jobs in the green space are being landed by some combination of strategic searching, serious networking, inside connections, and a lot of serendipity. It’s a fight against entropy, and the results in terms of who’s getting jobs are, at times, essentially random.

There’s no guarantee for a job right away, but folks who are best preparing themselves are those who are getting education, volunteering, networking,* and trusting that in the coming months, things will pick up and the promise of green jobs will become more of a reality. Hang in there!

* Some upcoming networking opportunities - check out our Partners page for more info:

• RMI2009 - BGT members get a 10% discount, or just check out RMIQ, an evening networking/mingling event here in San Francisco.
• West Coast Green - BGT members get a 20% discount on full pass. We’re sponsoring the Green Jobs Pavilion - come find us on the Expo floor!

Last night, I stopped by San Francisco Green Drinks (sponsored by the RMI2009 conference), which has become the place to “see and be seen” if you’re involved in a green business or organization in San Francisco. The event is jammed every month with folks who work on green from all kinds of different angles - activism, carbon investment funds, sustainable jewelry, nutrition, you name it.

Green Drinks is great for wide exposure and catching up with other greenies you know, but given the crowded space and the noise level, it’s not going to be great for an in-depth conversation about your professional background or talking about why you want to work for that person’s company. By the same token, I met about 4 different people last night who I’ve connected & worked with online and finally got to put a face to a name and connect with them on a more personal level, even if just by way of a brief conversation.

I liked Seth Godin’s post below - though he’s talking about the quality of interactions in terms of marketing, the same goes for networking. As he says, “There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media.” Chatting with a bunch of different people for 3 minutes at a network event is like Twittering to a big group at a low cost to you, but there’s a lot more value in following up with them on a “high bandwith” interaction like volunteering together or collaborating on a project.

O.K., not a perfect analogy, but the take away lesson is this: Leveraging different types of networking - online & offline - will help you balance quantity of interaction with quality of connection and allow people to get to know you on a variety of levels.

The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about (by Seth Godin)

Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.

Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time–like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other–like a phone call).

Up and down, I’ve charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there’s audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they’re high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there’s not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it’s 400 years old.

So, what can you learn here?

1. There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media. You can’t have a real time conversation online that carries the digital impact of a movie or some other high bandwidth entertainment.
2. The bottom left corner is the scrap heap. It’s hard to place a commercial value on this part of the grid and there’s not a lot of commercially interesting work being done here. People just aren’t interested in low bandwidth, non-interactive media. Graffiti, for example, rarely draws a paying crowd.
3. The top right of the corner is where huge value and difficult sales lie. Not everyone can pay for the scarce resources needed to deliver an in-person seminar or one on one coaching, but those that need and can afford it, love it.

If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?

This past Sunday, our new marketing intern Dana and I were featured in the Business section of the SF Chronicle in an article called Tough Job Market Requires that Grads Adjust.

The article is copied below, but I’d suggest you also check out the comments. Clearly, the job market is a hot topic - the comments range from fiery to frustrated to constructive. Lots of people suggested that recent graduates who are having trouble finding a job go start their own business. While I do know several friends who’ve been laid off and started in on their own projects, some of the same problems persist: recent grads’ networks aren’t as strong for funding and business support, they have a tougher time convincing investors they’re serious, and they don’t have the savings to back up the ventures on their own.

What this article is really about, then, is bootstrapping — that recent graduates are having to come up with creative ways to stay afloat and to pursue what they’re passionate about. That might mean working for free 3 days a week while supplementing with a restaurant or childcare job; it might mean working nights on getting a business up and running; or it might mean going back to school to get some more targeted experience.

For some of our job advice for recent grads, click here.

Tough job market requires that graduates adjust

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Stanford graduate John Dryden didn’t have a job lined up before he got his diploma in June, but in this economy he feels lucky to have been offered a contract post.

“I look at it as a case where the glass is half full,” said Dryden, 22, a business major who had an internship last summer that, in better times, would have led to a job.

“The company has a hiring freeze but they’re still interested in bringing me back in the fall, not as a full-time employee with benefits but as a contractor,” Dryden said, adding, “I feel very fortunate.”

Young people nationwide are being forced to adjust their expectations and try new tactics as recent college graduates face the toughest job hunt in decades.

“The current situation compares to the early 1980s, which was also an extremely difficult job market for college graduates,” said Edwin Koc, research director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The association regularly surveys the nation’s largest employers about their plans to hire graduating seniors.

“Typically we have a positive story with an annual increase in the number of hires,” Koc said. “But when we asked employers what they expected to hire from this graduating class relative to last year, it was down 22 percent.”

The association also asked a sample of this year’s 1.6 million college seniors about their employment prospects and discovered a sharp drop from a prior poll.

“In 2007 when we surveyed students, over 50 percent of the class had a job offer before graduation,” Koc said. “This year it was 19.7 percent.”

Desiree Fabunan, 23, is one of those who beat the odds by getting a job with AT&T’s Western Region headquarters in San Ramon before graduating from Stanford in June.

“A lot of people were down in the dumps,” Fabunan said, recalling the mood on campus. “Back in January, people were really panicking because you know that at Stanford so many of the grads that had come before you had jobs by that time.”

Dana Lin, a recent college graduate who lives in Mountain View, said employers in this market are demanding more than a degree.

“Many jobs call for three or four or five years of work experience,” said Lin, 22, who earned her undergraduate degree in business from Cornell University in 2008.

April layoff

Back then, when the college job market was still strong, she got a marketing position with a Silicon Valley software firm. But she was laid off in April. To bolster her brief work experience, Lin is doing a part-time, unpaid internship with the San Francisco startup Bright Green Talent, a recruiting and staffing agency for the sustainable energy industry.

“We did not have much of a problem taking these internships when we were in college,” Lin said. “It allows me to learn new things in new areas.”

At Bright Green Talent, Lin works with full-time employee Carolyn Mansfield, a 2008 Stanford graduate who found that, even then, her anthropology degree didn’t impress employers. She also worked for free to gain experience, first as an unpaid media intern for the Sierra Club and later at Bright Green Talent, which hired her after a two-month trial period.

“It’s about getting your foot in the door and letting employers see your work ethic and how you perform on the job,” Mansfield said.

But while young college graduates face a tough job market now, long-term trends work in their favor.

“Many employers can forecast a large number of retirements coming up in the next three to five years,” said Tom Devlin, career center director at UC Berkeley.

Positions will open

Koc, the employment expert, said this retirement trend means positions will open up for young college graduates once the recession ends even if the recovery is too weak to create job growth.

But at the moment the circumstances are less favorable.

“Opportunities that may have been there in the past have not been as plentiful for our graduating class,” said Dryden, the Stanford alumnus.

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/02/BU6I18SL7L.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

If you’re starting a job search, probably the first thing you’ll do is start to hang out on job boards to see as opportunities come up.
But be wary: job boards have the potential to be a waste of time.

Yes, this may seem counterintuitive, given that we at Bright Green Talent post all of our jobs on job boards. However, it seems like every day we get an email from some new “green” job board, claiming to be all sorts of superlatives (the “best,” “largest,” “most relevant,” etc).

The creators of these job boards are correct in identifying a market opportunity - there are a LOT of jobseekers right now, there’s a LOT of interest in green jobs, and it seems like you can make a quick buck by setting up a posting site and charging per post or just for advertising given increased traffic.

However, in the end, another green job board doesn’t really help anyone — it wastes the jobseeker’s time who has to add another site to the list of places they visit; it wastes the employer’s time who feels like they have to post their job in another location. The reality is that, as of yet, there aren’t the mass numbers of green jobs that necessitate so many different green job boards, so each of these hundred-odd sites basically shows the same set of jobs.

So, how can you fight back and make sure you’re using your jobseeking time efficiently and effectively?

1. To reiterate: You should not be spending hours daily perusing job boards. To stay up to date on what’s being posted, set up a Google Reader account with RSS feeds from your favorite job boards. This way you can see at a glance when new jobs are posted without getting bogged down in visiting all of them.

2. Install the Alexa ranking tool bar on your browser so you can see which job boards are actually getting a lot of visits. Some of our personal favorites include GreenBiz’s, Treehugger, Net Impact, Justmeans, Idealist, StopDodo and SustainLane (we post in a lot of other niche places according to the specific job).

3. Use a job board aggregator. In your RSS feeds, set up a search within SimplyHired or Indeed with specific keywords you’re interested and the locations you’re open to — the feed will do all the work for you of grabbing jobs from across the internet.

4. Use a recruiter. Signing up with a recruiter like Bright Green Talent will put your search in the hands of folks whose job it is to actively place people all day long — plus, we’ll be your advocate to get you an interview, coach you in advance of that interview, and help you negotiate should an offer come through.

5. Get well-integrated on social media sites so you can make direct connections with hiring managers. The best tool is LinkedIn, where you can see exactly who posted the job, who you know at the company, and can be much more strategic about your application.

6. Get in front of people. The truth is you’re much more likely to get a job through spending half an hour having coffee with someone each day than spending that time on job boards. 80% of people are hired through having some sort of connection with the company. Plus, given that companies know they’re going to get swamped if they post a job on a job board, a lot of jobs are going under-the-radar right now, and are being sourced exclusively by recruiters doing targeted searches or through employee referral networks without ever being posted publicly.