Tuesday’s Tip: E-mail Trick

Do you post your resume on various job boards? Do you receive E-mails from recruiters and hiring managers and ever wonder where they saw my resume? If so, below is a trick to take the mystery out of it. It will provide you the information you need to understand and manage the job boards that are working (and not working) for you. You can then make the necessary adjustments after you have the data.

Let's say Jim Smith has an E-mail account of: jim.smith@gmail.com. Jim would customize his resume that he uploads to Monster with an E-mail address of jim.smith+monster@gmail.com. This "+monster" is treated just like a comment and has no factor on where the E-mail is to be sent. The E-mail will still go to jim.smith@gmail.com, however, when Jim opens his jim.smith@gmail.com E-mail, he will see that this one was "sent" to jim.smith+monster@gmail.com. This will tell him that the person sending him the correspondence received his E-mail from the Monster job board that had his resume on it. If he does the same with Careerbuilder, he will see another E-mail that was sent to jim.smith+careerbuilder@gmail.com.

Possible concern (or plus) for doing this trick: Some people might be puzzled as to why he added "+monster" to his E-mail address, or they might think, "Boy, this Jim Smith character sure is organized. He set up a separate E-mail address for Monster just to manage his job search. When in actuality, he did not make a new E-mail address, he just added a "non-functioning" parameter to his already established E-mail address.