Tuesday’s Tip: Set Up Google Alerts

Everyone should go out today and "hire" the Internet as their personal assistant. This assistant can play a critical role in helping you find your next job opportunity. The good thing about this new employee is that she is virtually free, reliable (available 24 hours a day; most of the time), accurate (if you visit the right sites), dependable (if you feed her correctly; the right data), resourceful (if you know where to tell her to look), fast and wicked smart (can search and analyze millions of bytes of data per second and provide the results back to you according to your desires). However, if you don't guide this employee correctly, she can get lost in her own data, and be quite useless. One way to train her is to utilize Google Alerts.

Most of us think that we can "job search" by ourselves. But the fact is that we can only cover so much ground, and thus we miss a lot of leads or opportunities because most of us are just humans. Using Google Alerts is one part of this new employees job description.

You can find Google Alerts by selecting "more", then "even more" from www.google.com or by going to the following URL: www.google.com/alerts

You would want to use Google Alerts for news or information on your targeted companies list, keeping current with the latest trends in your field of expertise, tracking jobs posted that you are a fit for, seeing where people are meeting to discuss your topics of interest (networking) and even alerting you to when your name has been indexed by a search engine. It can be used for an endless number of reasons. Determine what you can't miss out on, and it probably qualifies for a Google Alert. Note: You can set up more than one and choose to have the results emailed to you "As it happens", "Daily", or "Weekly". Or for the advanced users, have this information sent to your RSS feed. Note: Think of an RSS feed as your custom online newspaper, however, only the information that you are interested in makes it to publication.

Google Alerts is one way to ensure that you do not miss that important piece of information that might have gone unnoticed. In upcoming blog posts, I will discuss some other neat tools to assign to your new employee.