Local recruitment firms talk Twitter, RSS when searching for opportunities When Kevin Watson found himself laid off from local auto technology firm TireStamp Inc. earlier this year, he turned to what millions of other job seekers have been doing lately: online job search boards. But what set the local software developer apart is that he gave up. A few days after that, he started his own - but with a twist. "I (spent) huge amounts of time going from job board to job board, and I realized there had to be a better way of doing it ... employers will list jobs on multiple job boards, so you end up finding the same job over and over again," he says. "So I put a (computer) program in that goes out to ... different job boards, finds them all, brings them back in and then checks them out and finds the unique ones." Mr. Watson's invention resulted in natsjobs.com, a site he co-founded with wife Nathalie that scours employment listings across North America, relaying them either through RSS or to paying subscribers through e-mail. After only three weeks of public operation, the two-person shop boasts 70 subscribers (paying about two cents a day each) and more than 1,000 unique visitors so far. Mr. Watson says his program has been searching online jobs since March 1 and has compiled almost 300,000 employment listings. With job websites in the U.S. alone seeing a 17-per-cent increase in traffic this past January year-over-year - a statistic from the Internet consultancy Hitwise - competition on Workopolis, Monster.ca and other traditional job sites is getting fierce. That's why, some say, social networking may be the best way of putting yourself out there. "We have some tight relationships with local companies (that) continue to submit job postings and job leads to us; we push that out to hand-held devices and e-mail," notes Fred Nesrallah, the program manager for ITO Ottawa - a reskilling entity that previously worked with casualties from the Dell layoffs, and has now moved on to helping former Nortel employees. "There are just way too many people out there that are looking for opportunities, so we really have to be creative," he says. Although ITO's website also serves as an interactive warehouse for job opportunities, sending out info to up to 8,000 people daily, Mr. Nesrallah urges clients to seek leads through each other. As one former member of a division gets a job, he says, that person can often bring members of the old team to the new employer - meaning it's important to keep tabs on former coworkers. The University of Ottawa's Mike Mulvey points out that job seekers are more sophisticated than even a couple of years ago. "Once upon a time, when you came to searching for employment, it was passive," says Mr. Mulvey, who teaches marketing at the Telfer School of Management. "(But) people are (now) branding themselves, so they're looking at their own identities as something that they can position and communicate either through their friendship networks."
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