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.

I’ve been hanging out with Chandlee Bryan quite a bit lately. Chandlee Bryan is a career coach and certified resume writer. She runs a great Meetup group for NYC job seekers where she gathers those seeking some or better employment to discuss how to achieve their goals. I had the opportunity to join the group for a Meetup last week.

I spoke to Chandlee about how I manage to search Craigslist every day for certain keywords with minimal effort. It’s something I’ve done for three years running now. Craigslist doesn’t have email notifications, it also doesn’t have fancy ways to save your searches. What Craigslist has is RSS feeds for everything. 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.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a file format on the web that allows you to check for new content (blog posts, podcast episodes, news articles, etc.) without going to the actual website. Most web browsers can read these files in one form or another, and there are many applications and web sites that can read these files easily. I suggest using Google Reader. For more on Google Reader, here’s a link to a video that explains it in English: Google Reader in Plain English.

If you’re a hairdresser in Anchorage, AK, you might check craigslist every day for new listing of people hiring hairdressers. If you look at the site every day, it’ll look something like this:

You could bookmark that page and visit it every day in order to be quick responding to a posting, but that takes time and effort on your part. I want this to be easier for you. Right-click the “RSS” button in the bottom right of the page when you’re looking at a Craigslist search and select “Copy Link” or something similar that your web browser will say in the menu that pops up.

So now we have the RSS file location for your search for hairdresser posting in Anchorage, AK copied. The next step is to head over to Feed My Inbox.

Feed My Inbox is a service that checks RSS feeds and emails them you daily when there is something new in the feed. This way, you don’t have to worry about RSS feeds or checking websites daily. Instead, you’ll receive email notifications you can check first thing in the morning. I recommend putting searches together for the “all jobs” and “all gigs” sections of Craigslist. This trick also works if you’re really looking for that specific IKEA Blergstaad end table.

The best part about using a combination of RSS feeds and Feed My Inbox is that the only cost to you is time. Craigslist provides the RSS feeds free of charge and Feed My Inbox is a free service from the great people at Brightwurks. This method is how I got my job at the now defunct New York Sun newspaper and how I’ve found a few pieces of audio gear I had been lusting after.

Are there other ways that you have simplified your job search? Let me know in the comments.

How do you treat your shortened URLs? I suggest you treat them like a disposable razor. Use them a few times, then toss it in the trash and forget it. Here’s another reason to treat them like garbage: it seems that the URL shortener tr.im is dead.

I learned this lesson the hard way after being burned in the past by URL shortener PopRL (see: A URL Shortener Lesson Learned). URL shorteners will come and go, and when they go they will take all of the URLs you’ve shortened with them. If you’re caught napping, you might miss that your favorite URL shortener was compromised and has started serving porn. For instance, I’d hate for Chris Brogan to find out that the link he gives out in his email signature for where to buy his new book Trust Agents suddenly directs people to a video of a woman farting on a cake.

Here’s the important lesson to learn here: Do not use URL shorteners for anything mission critical.

When you use URL shorteners, make sure that you know what you’re getting in return. It’s a way to fit a URL into a 140 character message. If you nee to use something more permanent, use a piece of HTML instead of a URL shortener. Here’s the code that I use to send people to my facebook profile at robblatt.com/facebook.

Put this code in a file named index.html in the folder of your choice on your server. Just replace all the [ and ] with < and > an you’re good to go.

[html][head]
[META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="1; URL=http://www.facebook.com/robblatt"]
[/head][body]
Rob Blatt’s Facebook page? Here we go!
[/body][/html]

Razor by Caro’s Lines via flickr

What’s going on here? The upcoming Judd Apatow movie ‘Funny People’ is using two different fonts for the movie title depending on where you see advertisements. Check out the image to compare the fonts:

I first noticed the difference with the shape of the N in both, but then I noticed it’s two totally different fonts. Who approved that?

I had the fun honor of recording the June Creative Mornings talk by Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com and design director of The New York Times. It was a blast. If my name sounds familiar, it’s because I do the technical work for the podcast Hey Brooklyn with Amber from The Amber Show. She did an interview with Tina a few months ago.

If anyone is interested in what I do professionally, check out Blattcave Productions, my production company. We just opened a recording studio in Brooklyn and would love to have you over.

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.

For those of you with jobs, here’s how the recruiting process goes.

1. Find job online you like. You either:
   1. Email a resume
   2. Have a website (Monster, HotJobs, etc.) submit your resume for you
2. Get a form response back from a recruiter to fill out an application of their website
3. Go into the recruiter’s office, fill out 15 minutes of paperwork and write your SSN a dozen times
4. Find out that you aren’t the right person for the job
5. Go home feeling frustrated, never getting a call back

It’s a process that would make Henry Ford proud, but at the same time it’s a broken system when you’re dealing with humans. How do I know it’s broken? I went for two interviews with different recruiters for the same job and signed contracts saying that I wouldn’t pursue the job with any other companies or with the company directly. I found out that I was going for the job after spending the time to fill out the paperwork involved and went through a quick interview. I was able to tell the person interviewing me that they were “looking for someone with more book publishing experience” before they could get to the end of the interview. I doubt that I have anything to worry about in regards to the contracts that I signed, but what about the time that I wasted that was both mine and the recruiters?

There’s an easy fix.

Do the human side of the process first. By sitting down and talking to you before filling out 15-20 pages of paperwork, you’ll find me in a better mood. You’ll get the most out of me as a job candidate and if I’m still interested in the job, I’ll be very happy to fill out whatever forms you want me to fill out. If I’m not what you’re looking for, you’ll find that out fast too.

What I find interesting is that career coaches have changed their tune to embrace the people they serve. As an example, my friend Chandlee Bryan gives away helpful information on her site Best Fit Forward and does her best to empower people that she isn’t working with yet with eBooks and organizes a meetup called NYC Job Seekers & Career Strategy Meetup for a low fee. Where are the recruiters that are making the same kind of impact?

IMG_1142 by rachaelhubbard via Flickr