Ok, so last week I went out for dinner with one of my colleagues and some friends to celebrate his birthday. Amidst the usual humorous banter about how ancient he is becoming, the conversation inevitably turned to work. I go to work, I write about work and now it seems I talk about it in my spare time! What has the world come to? But seriously, it is a keen interest of mine and all of the employees at FreeMyCV.com, to provide a service for the jobseeker that makes job seeking easy.

We all know that job seeking is a pretty arduous task. When I was looking for work after University, I spent most of my time avoiding the issue. You know it’s bad when you’d rather clean your grotty student accommodation than look for work!

But eventually there comes a time when everything is spotless, your dog is tired out from all the walks and if another person asks how the job seeking is going you will scream.  So you’d better do some. When you do force yourself to sit in front of the computer staring aimlessly at one of many jazzy jobs websites, claiming to fulfil your every job seeking need- what then?

It seems that job seeking is highly focused on those lucky people who know what career they want to pursue.  Some people seem to come out of the womb with a clear, focused career plan! However this clearly is not the case for a LOT of people. It may be because you’ve never found your passion, you’ve just come out of a career you didn’t enjoy, or you just haven’t got the foggiest.

So why do jobs websites always encourage you, with their little ticky boxes, to provide a profession; a job title; a job sector; an industry. It’s all the same question in various guises. Of course the common solution to this problem is to merely ‘select all’ or type no keywords into the search box, and thus you can browse leisurely through a variety of jobs until you find one that really makes you go... ‘I could do that!’

But it’s never that simple. By the fiftieth page you’ve given up all hope of finding something that will spring out at you and scream ‘APPLY!’ You endlessly scroll down pages of jobs, perhaps finding some that look interesting, but inevitably you do not quite make the grade due to some vastly niche qualification or skill they desire you to possess.

 So what now? This takes us suitably back to the start of my blog, the birthday dinner conversation and our attempts to change the world after a bottle of Semillon Blanc... What if you didn’t type in your chosen career path, because you don’t know what that is, but instead type in your skills? Intriguing you say? Or is that the voice of my hangover speaking...

Think about all of the things you are good at. Maybe you enjoy presentations, or public speaking perhaps? So you type in public speaking into the keywords... and voila! Instantly you have some potential career choices...Maybe you could go into marketing, social work, PR. Suddenly, instead of having pea picking in North Yorkshire, Managing Director of top law firm and Sales Assistant for local shoe merchant, all merged into one big list, you have a clear, defined search that has the potential to inspire you and suit your skills.

Similarly, if you have a degree or a qualification you want to harness in on, why not try typing that in? Instead of searching for ‘graduate careers’ type in ‘Computer Science Degree’ and get a perfectly tailored search to match your exact qualification. 

So if all else is failing, and you just can’t bring yourself to look at the 6,521st page of job vacancies, then why not trying a different approach to the job search? Type in keywords that are skill based and qualification based, rather than by location or industry. Even if you are not currently job seeking, it might give you a good idea of the kind of vacancies that harness your skills.

Happy Job Hunting!