I’m the Job Search Tech Specialist of the NYC Job Seekers group on Meetup. Something that I encourage each job seeker in the group to do is to start accounts on LinkedIn and VisualCV. There are two reasons I suggest starting accounts on these sites; the first is to provide extra information to potential employers and the second is to control the first page of results on Google, Bing and other search engines when potential employers search for their names.

According to an ExecuNet survey, 86% of executive recruiters say they have conducted background research on candidates using the web. I know that when someone searches me, they’ll find my blog, my company’s site, Flickr, Twitter, an audiobook I produced and some other Rob Blatt-centric sites. The bottom line is, it’s me.

Sometimes you know more than you know you knew. It’s my best attempt at making up a Yogi Berra quote. Does that make sense to you? It will in a moment. At the end of this post, you’ll have set yourself up daily notifications of new jobs in your area on Craigslist based on the keywords of your choice.

Recently I’ve spent a few afternoons inside of recruiters offices. Across the board, I’ve had similar experiences in each place I go. When I leave, I feel like a piece of processed meat and as unimportant as a bicycle made for a fish. The user experience as the job hunter is like trying to program a VCR without any of the buttons on the remote being labelled.

As you probably know, I’m looking for work. One of the things I do on a regular basis is to post my resume to the resume section of NYC Craigslist. As a result, I get a lot of false promises in my inbox, but today I got the absolute worst kind of spam.