Online Tools That Will Help You Land a Job

By Jaime Garcia Montes on July 25, 2017

The level of competition in the market for job hunting has never been higher. As college students, the odds are much less in your favor, considering most college students lack the necessary experience and availability to land most jobs. As practically every element of the world has altered and advanced through the developments made in this digital age, the process of job hunting has also evolved.

Although the competition is at an all-time high, it has also never been easier to find job openings with the help of websites such as Indeed.com, Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, etc. Applying for these types of websites requires developing an online résumé, e-portfolio, and other forms of an online persona. Throughout this article, I will highlight several online tools to help make your online persona stand out which will give you the much-needed boost over your competition in the job market.

Résumés are quite possibly the most important aspect of any job application. They highlight who you are, your skills, and your experience. Simply put, a résumé can make or break a job application. In order for you to stand out and impress your potential employers with your résumé, it is best to create your résumé using Canva.com.

Canva allows you to create, design, and share a completely customizable résumé. With hundreds of layouts and endless customization options, creating a unique résumé with Canva will make your résumé more interesting than your competitors’. One heads up regarding Canva, however, is that once your designed résumé is finalized, it cannot be edited as it is saved in a PDF format, thus any mistakes or new content that you would like to add to your résumé will require a complete redo.

Another very important factor that may determine whether you get the job you want or not is your personal portfolio. Wix.com is the best site for creating your electronic portfolio (or e-portfolio). Wix allows you to completely customize a web page from scratch and provides layouts for e-portfolios. By creating a well laid out and easily navigatable e-portfolio, potential employers will be able to get an in-depth look at what you offer as a potential employee.

Your e-portfolio should essentially be an interactive extension to your résumé. The benefit of providing an e-portfolio to potential employers is that you can include writing samples or any samples of past work that you would like to showcase.

The up and coming form of establishing a business oriented online presence comes in the form of LinkedIn.com. LinkedIn is a social network that allows you to connect and communicate with potential employers. Your personal profile should include your education, experience, and skills among other things.

The benefit that LinkedIn provides in the job hunt is the ability to individually reach out to employers. It also allows employers to find potential employees, such as yourself, much easier than in the past.

While on the topic of creating a business oriented online presence, I cannot stress enough how important managing social media responsibly is. Growing up in this digital age, many of us grew up with social media accounts from a young age. Many of the things that we post as immature adolescents are excusable and innocent at the time, but these same posts can come back to haunt your professional profile years later if not properly managed.

Just as an example of how important it is to properly maintain a professional online presence, simply looking at this year’s NBA draft and NFL draft will showcase exactly why that is important. Shortly after players had the best moment of their lives by being drafted by professional sports teams, fans of the respective teams did research on their new sports stars and found some interesting things.

Players such as the Chicago Bear’s Mitchell Trubisky, the Portland Trail Blazer’s Zach Collins, and the Dallas Maverick’s Dennis Smith Jr. were all put on blast on the Internet for old tweets that they had posted. By simply looking up each of their names with the word ‘tweet’ after, these headlines will stick with them forever. It just goes to show that there is no escaping a bad online presence; if you intend on being taken seriously as a professional, it is vital that you properly manage your social media profiles and make sure that anything that may hinder your chances at getting a job is removed.

By taking advantage of these online tools, your chances of being recognized and potentially hired will dramatically increase. It is important to embrace the changes happening in the market of job hunting because your competitors will. As the digital age continues to evolve, more online tools will be introduced and it is fair to assume that the market of job searching will be altered once again. As for now, using the online tools listed above will certainly aid you in your search for a job.

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