Using Your Personal Website To Clinch That Job!

By Colin Ong Tau Shien
Posted Saturday, September 4, 2004

With an increasing number of employment portals emerging, it is apparent that internet tools do help bring the job-seeker and the potential employer together. A sophisticated job search engine enables the job-seeker to have a smaller sample of relevant job openings instead of going through countless newspaper advertisements.

However, for most job-seekers, their resumes are not attractive enough. They can utilise their personal homepage to boost their chances of grabbing that all-important interview.

Here are some tips:

Allow potential employers to email your referees:

It is important to invite potential employers to email to your referees. Alternatively, you can be systematic and create a simple online feedback form to enable employers to select the information needed and send this request to your referee. Remember to create a brief online profile of your referees to create more credibility.

Your Articles:

It is important to write about 5 articles that demonstrate your interests and allow them to download these articles as pdf files. Your employers maybe impressed with your maturity and willingness to share knowledge to the visitors of your website. For example, if you are seeking employment for a marketing position, you should include an original article about the advantages of internet marketing.

Your Electronic Newsletter:

A natural progression from providing free articles is to invite visitors to be part of your ezine. It will also be advisable to inform subscribers about the contents of your free ezine and to invite article contributions. A certain measure of success is if your ezine membership can swell to about 500 people.

Using the marketing post as an illustration again, if a forward-looking organisation hires you, they may request that you include their corporate profile and website as a link from your ezine. In the same way, your ezine can also be featured in their corporate website. If you have not embarked on creating an ezine, great places to start are at I Make News.com and Constant Contact.com.

Mini ebook:

Alternatively, you can create a mini ebook. The rule of creating an ebook is that your content should include articles that will be relevant for webmasters. The reason is that you invite people who download it to launch it off their website. Thus your ebook will help you gain awareness through different websites. Some examples of good ebook titles are "Tips to getting more customers", "More traffic means more revenue" and "This ebook will make you rich" etc.

Your favourite links:

Your potential employer can also understand more of your strengths and interests by viewing your links. Before you start adding links to your website, please ensure that you do not infringe any copyright laws. It will be wise to email the webmaster to seek permission to link to their website. You can also use this opportunity to request for their website logo if they do not provide an affiliate program. To further impress potential employers, you can include a footnote below your website that states "I will like to take this opportunity to thank the webmasters of the following sites for personally granting me permission to use their corporate logos to link back to them. I am honored to be associated with them." Providing acknowledgements do have privileges.

The Guest Book:

Use your guest book wisely. Employers may not be convinced about the credibility of non-corporate email postings to your guest book. You may consider encouraging visitors to send greetings using their corporate email. In return, you will allow them to use their signature file to provide a brief profile of their companies below their postings.

About The Author
Colin Ong TS is the Managing Director of MR=MC Consulting (http://www.mrmc.com.sg/) and the Founder of the 12n Online Professional Networking Community (http://www.mrmc.com.sg/12n)
colin@mrmc.com.sg