Greetings students and graduates! I hope you are all either enjoying the first few weeks of a fresh year (or first year) at University, or feverishly beavering away in the hunt for internships and graduate jobs. Don’t forget that our student careers blog is here to help, and today I have a particularly tasty treat for you.

I’m sure you are all thoroughly well-versed on the joys of social media, having had myself and my fellow freelancestudents.co.uk bloggers ram the point home since our inception. However, at the risk of you being suffocated by an ever-more complicated array of social media outlets which might help you get a job, this week I’ll be throwing a last one (maybe!) into the mix: Delicious.

Below is a run down of what it is, how it works and what it might be able to do for you.

What is Delicious?

According to the good folks over at their website, Delicious is:

“a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.”

What this essentially means is that Delicious is a clever way of bookmarking things on the hop as you browse the internet, or as you trawl your RSS feeds for exciting stories. Any web-page story that has the Delicious button nearby can be saved for later by clicking said button. For example, this one has it immediately at the bottom of the text.

That’s great, but how is it helping me get a job?

Delicious is a really useful resource in two ways. The first is fairly self-explanatory; Delicious can allow you to handily bookmark prospective job advertisements for later, instead of ending up with 50 web-tabs open and a painful migraine. Even if the page which houses the job advertisement doesn’t have a sharing option for Delicious, if you have your Delicious profile up you can ‘save a new bookmark’ (top-right hand corner) – this bookmark is then given various tags (i.e. financejob, royalbankofscotland, accountancy). This means that if you bookmark hundreds of prospective jobs you can easily sift through them via the tags which you have created. Setting up specific tagging categories (such as ‘topjob’ or ‘part-timejob’) can make this process extremely efficient.

The second way in which Delicious can help is through the site’s search function. Delicious is keen on the ‘power of the community’ (as noted above), meaning that most other users’ bookmarks are visible to you as soon as you sign up. Although many people will be doing the same job trawl/bookmark/tagging process as you, meaning some bookmarking of specific jobs, more useful are the job sites and company’s who have their own Delicious accounts. This essentially means that a few keyword searches can bring up plenty of prospective employers in a field or for a certain type of job, and may even pick up that perfect job you’ve been searching for.

Verdict

Whilst by no means essential in the same way as the Twitter searching tools are to rooting out great job opportunities, Delicious still provides another useful string to the job-hunters bow. It’s best to have a tinker around to get used to the way the site works, but after that Delicious can fairly simply be used to compliment your online search strategies.

TAGS: