NEWSLETTER 16
New on the Blog:
Here’s the latest post on the Freelance Writing Pros Blog:
Another Way to Find Unadvertised Gigs
This week’s post on the blog covers three ways you can use traditional job boards to find unadvertised freelance writing opportunities or new leads for your prospect list.
But job boards aren’t the only tool you have at your disposal to find these “hidden” gigs.
While my preferred way to go about this is to attract prospects rather than seeking them out, here’s a simple search trick you can use to find leads that might, or might not, make their way to standard job boards.
What you want to do is search the sites of applicant tracking systems (ATS).
What are ATS?
Applicant tracking systems are services companies use to manage their job openings (sometimes for their own site alone and sometimes they do also get shared on job boards). These services gather resumes and help companies filter through initial applicants.
I’d be lying if I said I was a fan of these vendors. After helping my husband with a long-running job search, I know what a nightmare they can be on the applicant side if your keywords aren’t just so. But anyway…
These ATS companies generally host job listings for their clients on their own domains. That means you can use custom Google searches on an ATS domain to find openings from any company working with them.
This not only came in handy when helping with that job search, but it’s a trick I use to stay on top of certain companies’ ongoing gigs and new openings when curating jobs for All Freelance Writing’s job board.
Some Examples of ATS Companies
Here are three ATS sites you might search for more potential leads, using the same kinds of tips from this week’s blog post.
Now let’s take a quick look at how you can search these sites.
Search ATS Listings with a Custom Google Search
To find leads on ATS sites, searching across multiple clients of theirs, you’ll want to use a simple custom Google search.
For example, let’s say you want to try the tip about searching for full-time writers — copywriters in particular, and you want to search Jobvite’s site.
Visit Google, then enter the following for your search string (minus the quotes):
“Copywriter site:jobvite.com”
In your search results, you’ll see all copywriter jobs currently listed by the company’s clients, both full-time and freelance.
I prefer to take this a step further though to make sure I’m seeing the freshest listings.
To do this, click “tools” near the top of your search results list. Then for the dropdown that says “Any time,” choose the time frame you prefer, such as “Past Week.”
To speed up these searches, you can do them once, then save the results page link into your bookmarks (I keep these links on my new tab page using Start.me).
Then any time you want to search these sites to see what’s new, all you have to do is click those saved links.
I hope this week’s tips help you find some new leads!
Jenn
