Knowing what you want to do is no use if there are no jobs to apply for. So you must look in all the right places if you want to have a choice and find enough jobs to consider.
How You Hear Of A Job
There are six main ways you might find a job:
- An advertised vacancy:
- in a newspaper or magazine
- shop windows
- on a local radio station
- at a jobs fair
- the World Wide Web.
- Internally advertised at work:
- word of mouth
- on a notice board
- newsletters or bulletins
- intranet (internal computer network).
- Through agencies:
- private recruitment agencies
- job centres
- careers services.
- Making a speculative approach:
- writing a letter
- calling in for a chat.
- By word of mouth:
- hearing by accident from friends or family
- asking people to look out for you at their place of work.
- Networking:
- This means making a positive effort to use business, social, family or other links to contact people who may know about new employment areas or organisations seeking recruits.
The Role Of The Internet
Over the last few years, the Internet has completely changed the way we live and manage our lives, and that includes job search. You will now find that, as well as special vacancy websites, most of the old methods for advertising jobs are also repeated on the World Wide Web. This includes websites set up by newspapers, employment (recruitment) agencies, job centres, employers and professional bodies.
To use your computer in this way, you must know how to search the World Wide Web. You will either have to use the correct web page address (known as the Uniform Resource Locator or URL) or visit the site of a search engine holding a database of thousands of pages that you can search using key words. Turn to the Appendix if you need advice on searching.
Email Alerts
If you have an email address at home, college or at work, you may be able to set up an email alert system. Enter details of the type of job you want into forms on vacancy or newspaper websites and each week they will send you details of any jobs that match your needs.
Post Your Cv
Some websites allow you to publish or ‘post’ your CV so that employers can look at it. (Don’t expect too much from this, however, as it is likely to be even less successful than advertising yourself in a local newspaper.) As long as the document is on your computer, floppy disk or a CD, clicking the Upload or Browse button will display all the files on your machine. Select the CV file and it will be sent direct to the site.
Note: Take care with this process as you can never be certain who will see your details. Check sites are password-protected and don’t put too much personal information into a CV that you are posting online. You should find that good sites such as
www.jobsearch.co.uk have details of their privacy policy, so read this before posting.