Friday, April 15, 2011

Tips for finding job in Singapore


I have just been head hunted while looking for a job in Singapore and I would like to give some tips on job search in Singapore. In this article I will write about leveraging Singapore job portals based on my own job searching experience.

Your CV is your advertisement and in order to be effective it must have the quality and it must be easily found! Do not forget, there are people out there looking for suitable employees for open positions and you must help them to find you. To help them, you need to create or upload well written,  keyword rich resumes into at least monster.com.sg, jobstreet.com.sg and jobsdb. Skipping on of this web sites will decrease your chance of being found greatly.

It is very important to make your resume rich in keywords. This means your CV should contains all keywords related to your dream job in it and at least top 2 or 3 of them are repeated for 4 times. For example if you are looking for an IT job in Singapore, you want to work as an IT Business Analyst and you are experienced in Java/J2EE these keywords (IT Business Analyst, Java/J2EE) should be repeated at least 4 times throughout the keyword. A keyword rich CV will (1) put you at the top when a head hunter searches for candidates in a job portal and (2) make you appear in more searches.

A best practice in CVs in terms of these keywords is to create a Key Skills section in the first page of your CV and fill it with keywords. But do not exaggerate it. Stuffing your CV with keywords may increase your chance to be found but it will look cheap and your CV would be skipped.

While using monster.com.sg, I have realized that after I log in to my account, e-mails inviting me to apply jobs start to come to me for a couple of days and if I do not log in, their frequency fades to zero in a week. It looks like monster bubbles your CV to top when:
  • You edit your CV
  • Apply to jobs through their Apply button
  • Login your account
I believe all job portals have mechanisms like these. So, regularly login to your account in Singapore targeted job portals and edit your CV, even if you do small cosmetic changes! And even most of the jobs have e-maıl to send your resume regularly use "Apply" functionality of the employment web site. These will combine with keywords in your CV and persistently keep you at the top of resume search.

Source: Dilbert
Other than traditional employment web sites there are also online job search engines specialized on job searches over many job databases. One of them is featured here before: Careerjet.sg. Careerjet.sg is basically a search engine like a general purpose search engines i.e yahoo and google. It employs bots/spiders to scan jobs from various online sources: employment web sites (i.e. jobsdb), company web sites, recruitment agency web sites, etc. It then indexes these jobs in its database like Google indexes web pages. When a job seeker performs a job search, based on the keywords entered it displays the most relevant job to the user.

Recently popular and very effective source of jobs is linkedin. If you somehow do not know what linkedin is, it is a business-oriented social networking site, you can say Facebook of business networking. Create an account in linkedin, fill it with your experiences, add people to your network and collect recommendations. Then join groups of your interest and jobs will flow to you. I have also been contacted by head hunters several times through linkedin messaging mechanism.

To summarize:
  1. Keep well written keyword rich resumes in all of the main Singapore employment web sites. These are at least monster.com.sg, jobstreet and jobsdb.
  2. Regularly login to your employment web site accounts and update your CV. This will carry your CV to the top of the searches conducted by companies and head hunters.
  3. Use specialized job search engines like Careerjet.sg
  4. Use linked-in.
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