That's what I found in my job search. I thought I would be in a job search for a few weeks and then move out of this phase. Weeks became months... and I found that I was in a serious job search. Not that I wasn't serious at first, but as months went by the stakes grew larger and larger. Money was running out and my resume was looking more pathetic with this growing "out of work" time!

I managed all of my activity in a fairly sophisticated spreadsheet that I built. It allowed me to keep track of target companies, places I applied to, specific jobs I applied to, new contacts, etc. I had little codes to show me when I needed to follow up and kept all the various logins to different job boards. It worked great!

Until about the sixth week. By that time I had gathered so much data that my spreadsheet was getting out of hand (as spreadsheets do). I was frustrated that I wasn't getting a job (hardly getting interviews), and frustrated that I didn't have any of the software tools that I was used to.

It dawned on me that there were others who would be frustrated also. I thought, what if there was a tool to manage all of the complexities of a job search, and even be of value between job searches??

I designed a website, JibberJobber.com, to do just that. JibberJobber is a website where you can manage all of these complexities during a job search and keep this up after you land your job. The model is very simple, there is a lot of stuff you can do in the free version, and an optional premium version allows you to do more (pretty ambiguous, huh?). Note that there is no time limit on the free version - I figured you would need to use something like this during the 9 or so job changes you would have... doesn't it make sense to manage your career relationships as you go?

This is already too long for one blog post, but if I've piqued your interest, go sign up for a free account on JibberJobber.com.