Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Looking for a job? Use a widget

A friend of mine asked me if I knew of any good job-finding widgets. The question sent me on a search.

The first one I found was a winner: the Simply Hired widget. It has all the essentials for good, easy job searching.

The widget allows you to search for jobs using your choice of search words in any U.S. location. You can assign any mileage radius around that location, and to search the entire U.S., just leave the location and radius fields empty. The widget saves your searches so you can access any of your searches quickly form the Menu button.

The widget is based on the same job search engine used at the simplyhired.com site.

See a real-world example of the widget in my sidebar on the right-hand-column of this page. Feel free to use it. And good luck with your job search.

P.S. Don’t miss the “Panic” button.

Pros: Not only embeddable to Web pages, but can also be installed as a desktop widget.
Cons: Search is currently limited to the U.S. only. Canada is said to be added soon. It’s not clear that you can single-click any search result to open it. It’s also not clear that to get the desktop widget, after downloading the SpringWidgets platform, you need to find the Simply HIred widget in their Widget Gallery, click the Options button and select the Desktop icon.
Coolness factor: 4/5
Platform required: None, if it will be used on a Web page. As a desktop widget, requires the SpringWidgets downloadable platform (see below).


Get the Web-based widget from SpringWidgets: here
Get the desktop-based platform and widget from SpringWidgets: here