Social media is everywhere: We tweet to the world, update our status on Facebook for our friends, and pour our professional lives into LinkedIn. People have even been fired from their jobs because of things they've said on social media sites. Now a new job search site called Jackalope Jobs plans to take all of that social information to help you land a new position.
Like all of the other job hunt sites, Jackalope Jobs lets you search for jobs via keywords and location. Where it differs from other sites is that it gives you the ability to link your search with people you know from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo in order to help you get noticed in the jobs you apply for. The results page lists how many people you know at each company and lets users contact those people from the interface. It's a great way to harness the power of social networks and should help simplify the search for a new job.
However the site still has some issues that need to be resolved. Currently the "search by location" does not support entering ZIP codes; instead, the entire city and state must be entered. While the auto-complete works well, typing five numbers is much easier. The other issue is when reaching out to people in your network, there doesn't seem to be a way to import their email addresses from the sites. Sending a LinkedIn message is easy, but it would be a chore to gather up the email addresses to send.
We all know that networking is the most important part of landing a new job, so it's nice to see a site that attempts to harness the power of social media to help with that goal. While the site is still a little rough around the edges, the company seems to be responsive to email so we expect to see big improvements going forward. Jackalope Jobs appears to be another good tool in the job hunter's arsenal.
Source: Jackalope Jobs
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