The firm I worked for had a downturn in business, so my position as Operations Controller was eliminated. It had been 12 years since I had been job hunting, so extensive networking was new to me. I started out by revamping my resume, and posting on the usual sites (Monster and CareerBuilder).

I had a LinkedIn account, but it just listed my companies and job titles, so I updated my profile with a full description of accomplishments and expertise. I posted my full resume on Emurse.com and linked to it through my LinkedIn profile. I did not have many connections, so I began to search for all my old contacts and reconnect with them.

As I joined several of the local job seeker groups I noticed they all preached a common theme, your next job will come through networking. In the beginning I was relying on the job sites and sending out resumes, but had little response. I got only one interview through a Monster ad. So I began networking. I used my contact lists plus the contact lists from the various job groups and began scheduling coffee meetings with CFO’s, Controllers or company executives. I also networked with other job seekers for mutual support, sharing of tips and techniques and offering to help them with contacts and sharing job leads. A couple meetings with people who had HR experience helped me polish my resume.

I also developed a personal marketing plan, which is a good document to use in networking meetings as it prompts the other person to help you when they see your list of target positions and companies.

I also began answering questions on LinkedIn groups and wrote two blogs to keep my name in front of people. These activities also helped me expand my network. I talked to a lot of recruiters, but met with little success as they were seemingly overrun with candidates.

As I built my network through coffee or lunch meetings, I kept in touch with my contacts. I always emailed a thank you to the person I met with and promised to keep in touch. About every four to six weeks I sent out an email update to my contact list, keeping them informed of my progress and asking them to keep me in mind when an opportunity arose. There were also people in my network with who could not find time to meet, so we kept in touch via email. I also updated my LinkedIn profile every few weeks so I would appear in LinkedIn updates.

My main strategy was face-to-face networking and I also tried to attend networking events to make new contacts. I still looked at the online ads, just to see who was hiring, and then used LinkedIn to try to find a contact within that company to network with.

Keeping in touch with my contacts paid off as a former colleague who kept in contact through email heard about the Controller opening at Freedom Health. He emailed to see if I was interested, then put in a recommendation for me with the company and passed along the contact information. I called the company, scheduled an interview, and was hired shortly thereafter.

My advice to the job seeker is this – Use a multi-pronged approach to job seeking. Build your network, use face-to-face meetings as much as you can and follow up regularly. You never know when one of your contacts will hear of an opening, and you want your name to be at the top of their list. Try to attend networking events, pick several recruiters to keep in touch with and use the job sites to keep aware of what companies have activity. Use LinkedIn groups for information and job leads. Find a networking group specific to your field (I joined FENG, the Financial Executives Networking Group). Get away from the computer; you need to be networking out in public. Don’t be afraid to ask people for help and advice. You will find most of them will be glad to help.

Make some time for yourself. I began bicycling on the Towpath Trail for exercise and to get back into shape. Set goals for yourself (number of phone calls, number of contacts to make, numbers of companies to research, etc.). And most of all don’t give up hope. Through perseverance, follow-up and constantly refining your networking skills, you will eventually turn up the right opportunity. Then keep networking once you land, and offer to help those still in transition. As someone recently said, when you are working it’s just your time between searches.

Scott

When you go into a job interview one of the most important things you need to do is research the company you are interviewing with and learn all you can about them. Or if you are preparing your personal marketing plan, you need to come up with your list of target companies.

How can you accomplish this? The web resources I use are listed below.

Google (www.google.com) – Google the company name and you’ll get a host of information. But you’ll do better by setting up Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) and getting a daily email about the company. A better way to organize these alerts is by setting up an account with Alertrank (www.alertrank.com) which organizes all your alerts into daily emails.

Of course Linkedin.com is the place to look for people who work in your target company, plus they have short company profiles and links to their web sites.

You can also search for companies on Twitter (www.twitter.com) and save your results into Twitter lists. But this information is more consumer driven and not usually business information posted by the companies themselves.

More and more companies are now using Facebook (www.facebook.com) to promote themselves. You can follow your target companies on Facebook.

Alltop (www.alltop.com) lets you save topics into groups and monitor them. The drawback here is you are limited to their pre-determined groupings.

Business.com is a good search engine for general business and company information.

You can upload all your LinkedIn contacts and email address books to Gist.com and you will end up with a page of news feeds about your contacts and the companies they work for.

For researching non-profits, use Guidestar.org. Sign up for a free account and you can review the 990’s of these organizations.

Lead411.com lets you search for companies and their email addresses and receive daily email alerts.

Reference USA is available on-line through your local library if you have a library card. The only limitation I have found through my library is that they limit you to downloading 25 companies at a time, which is pretty annoying if your search returns a long list. You can search by various factors like company size, sales, zip code, etc.

Small Business Online is a local magazine which has a business search engine on their site. Go to http://bizsearch.sbnonline.com and try it out.

Yahoo has a finance business search engine at finance.yahoo.com which is another good resource, as is Zoominfo.com.

Well, that’s how I personally conduct my business intelligence search as I pursue opportunities as a Corporate Controller. Let me know what websites you use and I’ll add them to my list so we can all benefit.

Thanks,

Scott Hall

http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottwhall

Reader comments:

I also recommend using Hoovers, or preferably reading the 10-K (annual report) of the company. This can usually be found on the investor relations section of the company website. The most important part of the 10-K (for interview purposes) is the industry and company overviews, which will give very detailed information about the company and its industry.
Posted by Thomas Grealis

I research the surrounding community court records to see if companies have been involved in litigation. A friend recently used LinkedIn to e-mail former employees and gain some insight on the company as an employer as she considered joining it. Just a couple of thoughts.
Regards,
Bob Stopar

Also try http://www.Hoovers.com
If the company is publicly traded try http://www.sec.gov then use the Edgar search
Posted by Joseph Mullin, Engineering Manager

Great tips guys. Thanks!
Posted by Marleen Graham

by Scott Hall

How many of you are using Twitter or other social media in your job search? There have been several articles on the web about using social networks to find jobs, but I haven’t had any luck.

I have not been able to successfully figure out how to use social media when in transition. I don’t Tweet, but I do follow some areas of interest on Twitter. I follow auto racing and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and I have several jobs Tweets that I follow:

Cleveland Accountants http://twitter.com/AccountantsCLE

Jobs Akron http://twitter.com/JobsAkron

Akron Jobs http://twitter.com/Akronjobs

Since I’m finance and accounting guy I follow the Cleveland accountant’s postings. This is much easier to do now that Twitter has a lists feature, and you can follow their public lists. For instance I follow a CFO list: http://twitter.com/milesj/cfo

Before lists, you had to use an application such as Tweetdeck www.tweetdeck.com to organize your lists.

To me, Twitter is just a glorified RSS feed (with a 140 character limit).

I’ve tried MySpace when I heard about MySpace jobs, but that just turned out to be a rehash of SimplyHired.

The same for Facebook. I set up a Facebook page just to follow my son’s High School marching band page. I don’t have any “friends” on Facebook, but once I set up the page I was bombarded with friend requests. Maybe I should set up everyone I know as a friend then send out a notice saying ”I’ve been downsized, help me find a job.” But that seems kind of desperate to me. Plus it’s a control issue. I don’t want people writing things I can’t control or posting comments on my page I might not want an employer to see.

Right now I used LinkedIn for professional networking and that’s working quite fine. www.linkedin.com/in/scottwhall Plus nothing takes the place of a well placed phone call or a face-to-face networking meeting.

My best way of tracking the job boards are setting up alert using my keywords “Controller, CFO and Accountant” at the usual places, Monster, Indeed, CareerBoard and CareerBuilder. Plus I look a Craig’s list occasionally.

So I guess my best internet strategy is LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, job alerts and the emails I get from my Yahoo job hunting Groups. Other than that, social media isn’t working for me.

What are your thoughts? What works for you?

If you like this blog, let me know, I’ll keep writing.

Scott