Employment Management Websites

There are several popular websites that are dedicated to helping you find your next opportunity. They encourage you to engage with them when searching for job and internship openings. Some of these include:

• Indeed
• Flex Jobs
• CareerBuilder
• LinkedIn

These sites will provide job openings, allow you to create a profile, post your resume, provide useful information and tips for your job search, provide the option to apply for openings right from their site, and encourage you to interact with them in a variety of ways. The benefits of these sites are that they are regularly updated with new job openings, they allow you to save jobs, help you keep records of your job search, and they keep up to date with employment trends. Some provide resume and cover letter writing assistance, AI tools, opportunities for professional development, alerts for professional events, a space to store a professional portfolio, option to join relevant professional groups, and more. Some employment websites will allow you to post your resume and post updates that you are available for work. This assists employers with finding qualified candidates, and can help you find potential employers.

I encourage you to spend some time getting to know these sites and deciding which one, or more than one, will be helpful to you.

LinkedIn is especially popular in that it allows you to create a professional network and to engage directly with your professional network on a regular basis. LinkedIn is essentially social media for professionals with over 1 billion users world-wide. I have heard many stories about students being contacted via LinkedIn and encouraged to apply for opportunities that match their education, skills, and experience. Many of these leads have turned into internships and full-time employment. We will discuss LinkedIn in more detail in a future chapter.

College Career Center/Handshake

When are looking for an internship or a job opportunity, meet with a representative from your college’s career center. Career centers have relationships with local employers and often have access to unpublished leads for high performing, and proactive, students.

Your career center will encourage you to create an account with Handshake. Handshake is known as a career management system, and is similar to an employment website, but current college students and recent college graduates have access to it. The account is associated with your college or university, and it allows employers to post employment/internship opportunities, and to specifically target individuals from local colleges and universities.

Company Websites

Take the time to identify companies/organizations you would like to work for and check their websites for job and internship openings. Typically, a tab on the home page which will provide more information about openings, or scroll down to the bottom of the homepage to see additional links. Employers usually provide a section titled, careers; or they may provide a search bar where you can enter a keyword, such as “jobs.” This may take a bit of investigating, but employers prefer when applicants submit application materials directly through their website.

If you don’t see any job or internship opportunities posted, consider using the contact us form to inquire about any openings, or ask where openings are posted when they become available.

Google Search

Use Google, or another search engine, directly to begin your job or internship search. Search job titles, job fields, specific skills, and the location in which you are planning to work. For example, “Communication internships in Kalamazoo, MI” will produce concrete results, but will typically route to one of the employment websites identified above.

People You Know

It’s always a good idea to let everyone you know when you are looking for employment or an internship. You never know who may lead you to your next opportunity. We will discuss networking in-depth in an upcoming chapter, and many ideas will be presented for creating professional contacts.

Research the Company’s Website

Before jumping into creating a resume spend time reading through everything on the company’s website. Employers provide a nice overview of the company and their values on their websites, along with employee profiles, mission statements, initiatives, community projects and other information that gives a feel for the company and what they value. This can give you a lot of clues as to what type of candidate they are looking for and ideas for things to include in your resume and cover letter and to talk about in an interview that the employer is connected to, and thinks are important.

Being able to demonstrate in a resume, cover letter, and in the interview that you are familiar with the company on a variety of levels will only be to your advantage, and it demonstrates that you are serious about the position, that you are knowledgeable about the company and the industry, that you pay attention to detail, and that you take the time to research to prepare yourself for new situations.

For example, I was interested in working for an organization a few years ago and after reviewing their website I learned that community service and volunteer work were of particular importance to them. Their website was filled with descriptions of employee service work and their mission statement mentioned the importance of giving back to the community. I revamped my resume to highlight my volunteer experience, and during the interview I was told, “Great that you have so much volunteer experience. That is important here.” Having this extra insight helped me secure this coveted position over other applicants who were just as qualified in terms of education, skills, and experience.