Of course, smart companies and recruiters have job boards on their own sites and today there are many options for paid and open source (free) job board software. They’ll even get picked up by LinkUp at no cost. Others launch lists of jobs and invite job seekers to post their resume on blogs, but the truth is that without robust job board software they don’t work very well or ever get much exposure and over time will become cumbersome to manage and use.

Barak has publicly declared FindAJobAlready will remain free forever.. this isn’t a BETA phase. Job seekers can post profiles/resumes and search jobs in the US, Canada and UK. They can also read 101 Ways To Find A Job (good stuff). Recruiters and employers can post jobs and search unlimited resumes for free. There are even ATS features –> just like those big expensive job boards have, great for small companies who do not have a budget for posting and access.

If you’re a job seeker you can also follow @faja_jobs. They have tweeted 123,065 jobs — that’s a lot of opportunity! The only advice I have is that they need to ditch the little bird and put an avatar up.… wake up guys!

One of the IMHO super cool features is a suggestion page. It’s smart and just good business.

This is the way to go. This is the right thing to do. FREE Job Boards rock!

P.S. I love the Eshet Chayil amulet on Barak’s other site and I’m going shopping there right now.

P.S.S. I don’t know Barak but I hope he accepts my LinkedIn invite.

My personality type doesn’t appreciate the drama so many others seem to live for. So, when I hear melodramatic statements like HR is Dead and Job Boards Are Dead they affect me as much as Jesus in Pizza Sauce in NEPA.

However, while watching the video — kind of using it as a vehicle for meditation, a job board acronym was revealed to me.

Job Opportunity Bottle-necked Beyond Our Ability to Reach it Directly

They’re not dead per se… maybe a little like stale pizza crust though, and most job boards are filled with scam bam thank you ma’am junk. You don’t know who is behind the postings and you don’t know if they are even real.

What is a job seeker to do? Well… network with company representatives/vendors via LinkedIn and niche ning sites, follow my list of Twitter HR/Recruiters, let all your friends and contacts know you are searching (and attach a resume to that email), go to networking events, painfully take the time to visit company website employment pages.. those are all things to do.

Or, you could check out LINKUP.

All of our jobs come directly from company websites. Almost any company, big or small, that has a career section on their website can be found on LinkUp. Currently, we have over 20,625 companies in our database that we monitor every night. Companies range in size from the largest to the smallest, and from all locations across the United States.

LINKUP goes quietly in the night like Santa’s little elves out into cyberspace visiting company website job boards and gifts the aggregated results to the United States of America.

Company job boards are still fresh.…. If you are a Corporate Recruiter be sure to see if your company’s postings are on LINKUP.

P.S. If you are a non-profit check out the March 2010 promotion for all services FREE.

Note: My personality type is INTP in case you weren’t going to be able to sleep tonight without knowing.

Except that Microsoft didn’t build in an Outlook feature to automatically capture contact information provided in signatures and convert it to a contact in the address book.

How silly of you Microsoft.

You have no idea (well, maybe you do), but I have super heavy email traffic and it all comes with a ton of contact info which is very time consuming to cut and paste into a contact card. Often, because I don’t have the time or desire, I end up saving email in a folder just to keep the contact info. Then I have to go hunt for it when I need it. I needed help and I was painfully aware of it.

Last weekend I decided to stop procrastinating and find a solution. I did a Google search for Outlook signature to contact converter (or something like that) and came across a few different possible solutions like ContactCopy, Signature 2 Contacts and gwabbit™.

gwabbit won rabbit ears down.… here’s why…

All 3 products perform the basic function I was looking for, take signature contact information and convert it to a contact in my Outlook address book. So I spent a little time comparing to see which one I should give a try.

ContactCopy

• Cost $39.95 / 14 day free evaluation
• Highlight the contact info, click a button on the toolbar it installs and a contact card opens with the fields populated. Save and voilá.
• A slightly interesting feature, you can click on an address and it opens a map in your browser. But, it’s not interesting enough.

Signature 2 Contacts

• Cost $24.95 / Free trial but I couldn’t find where it said how long it is for #FAIL
• Highlight contact information found in open e-mails, preview panes, other Outlook items, websites, or other applications. Copy and click on Signature2Contacts and the contact data is inserted into the Address Book
• Initially I was interested because there is a “Sync2 with Google Gmail Contacts” feature. I had difficult time finding good information about that on the site.
• Sorry, I gave up investigating because the website just wasn’t doing it for me. I’m using Firefox and it must be optimized for Internet Explorer. I admit to being too lazy to test my theory.

gwabbit

• Cost $19.95 / Trial version 14 days, save up to 20 contacts
• Automatically scans incoming Outlook emails, finds contacts, and instantly transforms them into contact records within your address book with a mouse click!
• Puts your contact fields away in their proper place in the address book and even checks your address book to see if you’ve already saved a contact previously before re-prompting you to “gwab” it again.

It seemed to be just the email contact magic I was looking for so, I downloaded the trial version. It went smoothly so I decided to check out their Twitter and Facebook accounts to see what others were saying. This is really another advantage I appreciate as a consumer that the other products do not offer. I saw happy people on the Facebook page and tweets from happy users. I left a Facebook comment about gwabbit being better than sliced bread and sent a tweet of my own to let them and others know how I was liking it. They were very quick to respond with acute friendliness and courtesy asking for feedback on how they could make it even better.

Whoa.….… they were speaking my language.

I could go into the parsing technology described on the website but you can go read that if you are really inclined to have to understand it. I am not. I am proud to be awed by the magic of it. When I click on an email and the little gwabbit bunny pops up and asks if I want to save the contact info I just click yes and a contact card appears for me to review and add notes if I care to. I click save and voilá… it’s actually fun!

There is something else you need to know if you are a BlackBerry user like me. BlackBerry App World carries gwabbit too! No more thumbing addresses and phone numbers — WOOT! They offer a FREE and paid version that do the same function with a little twist on the free one.

Can this get any better?

I wanted to buy the paid version because I was almost out of my 20 trial gwabs. There was just one thing left to know and truthfully regardless of the outcome I was going to buy it anyway. I had a question on using one license on two different machines because I use Outlook at work too on another computer. My email to gwabbit support was promptly answered by Laurie Shaffer, every bit as professional, friendly and efficient as the product, brand and website.

Gwab yourself a copy for your Outlook or BlackBerry and be sure to observe “Talk like a gwabbit day” the fifth Monday of every February.

Too cute!

Note: I was floored when I received the answer to my customer support question along with a complimentary product key, courtesy of Todd Miller for being such a huge fan.  Trust me for all the time it saves, gwabbit would have received this product review anyway. The rest of this is CYA because it’s always better to be safe than sorry:

© 2010 gwabbit, LLC. The gwabbit logo is a trademark of gwabbit, LLC. The gwabbit word mark is a registered trademark of gwabbit, LLC.
Microsoft Outlook is a registered trademark of Microsoft corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
The Trademark BlackBerry is owned by Research In Motion Limited and is registered in the United States and may be pending or registered in other countries. gwabbit, LLC is not endorsed, sponsored, affiliated with or otherwise authorized by Research In Motion Limited.