Ask any job seeker, and he’ll tell you that looking for a job is, in and of itself, a job. It’s time-consuming to prep your cover letter, tweak your resume, follow up and plan your interview, especially when you’re applying for multiple positions. Sure, you could make an intense, color-coded spreadsheet — but most of us aren’t that Type A. That’s where Huntsy comes in — it’s like HootSuite for your job search. Huntsy’s dashboard offer’s a bird’s eye view (hence the owl logo) of your job hunt, offering a bird’s-eye view of your professional prospects.
“People are applying to many different places — Huntsy is our way to make it easy for them,” says Cezary Pietrzak, Huntsy’s director of marketing. “The category is just so dusty.”
Huntsy’s cleaning it off with a slick UI and an organized and social approach to the intimidating job search. You can create an account via your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profiles (or create a new login if you eschew connecting via social sites), and then install the bookmarklet or Chrome extension into your browser. As you sift through job listings — on a company’s website, the Mashable job board, LinkedIn, Krop, CareerBuilder, Github, Monster and more — you can click the Huntsy bookmarklet to save exciting prospects. A Huntsy widget will push down in the browser and fill out the necessary details — company, title and job description — by extracting it from the job listing.
The bookmarklet in action
Once you click “Add to Huntsy,” the job will be added to your dashboard, which looks like this:
Within the dashboard, you can schedule interviews and follow-ups, receive reminders to send thank-you notes, uncover professional connections at various companies (if you linked your social networks) and, most importantly, apply to jobs directly. If you’re applying to some jobs in marketing and others in PR, Huntsy can save several versions of your resume and a few different cover letters, letting you emphasize certain strengths and experiences for various positions. When you submit your application, your resume is included in the email as a unique, downloadable link. No longer must you feel as though your application has been thrust into a black hole, never to be seen by human eyes, because you’ll receive a notification the moment someone downloads your resume. This feature enables you to have great timing with a follow-up email, since you’ll know that your resume is fresh in the recruiter’s mind. (The application email also BCC’s Huntsy, so the dashboard can track your actions throughout the application process and help you stay on top of each step.)
If you’re diligent about using Huntsy, then the email notifications and “today’s tasks” could keep you top of your application process, especially if you’re applying to more than a handful of positions. Pietrzak says Huntsy’s streamlining can save job seekers two to four hours per week, in addition to helping the hunt stay organized and productive.
“You start to have a sense of what’s going on in your job search,” says Pietrzak of Huntsy’s guidance tools. Plus, the way Huntsy breaks the application process into small steps makes the user feel like he is “getting somewhere” something every step of the way — a valuable feature, since the job search often can be daunting and overwhelming.
The site launched less than a month ago and has signed up more than 5,000 users, who are spending 10 minutes on the site per session, says Pietrzak. And many of them are coming back — 40% of the visitors are returning, suggesting that they are in fact using Huntsy with some regularity to manage and streamline their job search. The team is working to perfect the functionality and add new features, including calendar integration (for all of those reminders and interview dates) and linking with Google+. Since it’s still new, the bookmarklet can be a little buggy and tends to not fully extract all of the details for some jobs, but a simple copy-and-paste can load everything into your dashboard.
Huntsy is based in New York and was born out of the QLabs hacker community, where the team shares office space with Turntable.fm and Nestio, a Huntsy-esque dashboard for the apartment search.
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