One Day One Blog

By Julia Plevin '09

The capacity to communicate with people on the Internet never ceases to amaze me. After I wrote a blog that mentioned the onedayonejob.com website, I got a comment from the founder of this website. He wanted to talk to me! I was not sure why The Job Search Guru wanted to talk to some lowly job seeker like myself but I seized the opportunity.

The Job Search Guru turned out to be Willy Franzen, CEO and Co-Founder of onedayonejob.com, who graduated from Cornell in 2006. Willy did not know what he wanted to do when he graduated and realized that many recent college graduates, like himself, struggle with the transition into the working world and their own naïveté. His solution: to create a website which lists a job every day along with research tools to help a would-be applicant learn more. Willy finds most of the jobs that he posts on his own.

Willy gave me a few tips for the job search and urged me to use his most recent venture, foundyourcareer.com, as a research tool. Once I get started on this 21-day online job search boot camp, I will blog about my experience. For now, I will disclose some of the advice that he offered me:
1. Become a professional job-seeker.
2. Do not just apply to one job and then sit and wait until you hear back from them. Apply to ten similar jobs.
3. Don’t wait to hear back from the employers at all. Be proactive. When you sit back and wait, you put them in control of your job search.
4. By sending in your resume, you are making it easy for them to reject you. Find someone at the workplace you are interested in and call to learn more about the organization.

Basically, I have started to realize that the “attach your cover letter and resume” line that we always see on websites or job postings is a trap for the naïve job seeker. It is better to call someone and learn more before crafting that perfect cover letter and sending it into Bermuda’s triangle.

With that in mind, check out this website that has tons of interesting job listings that I stumbled across today: Alison Doyle's advice and commentary on jobs, careers, work, and life - You will need to be on twitter to take advantage of these resources. Get connected and get a job!

To the power of the Internet!