Number one tech job hunting hint

1. post your resume on dice.com.
2. ...
3. profit

As with any advice given before I actually get a job, there's a limit to how much I can guarantee the results. But it seems promising thus far. I posted my resume after 5 on a Tuesday. By the next day, I'd had nine resume views and four contacts. By the end of the week I'd had almost 40 views, and maybe 10 contacts. Friday was the first day I woke up without an inquiry in my mail box, and that was because Friday's recruiter had the good sense to call me in the afternoon (people, my employment is part-time, work from home. Why on Earth would I be up at 9AM? or 10AM? If I'm conscious before 10:30, it's because my cat let me know he was hungry by chewing through my Achilles tendon).

Most of the contacts are recruiting agencies. Those are my favorite, because the other contacts all seem to be for jobs on the other side of the country or jobs at companies that have already interviewed and rejected me (or, in one memorable case, the company I had worked for and been fired from. I never expected them to realize their mistake so quickly). Recruiters are actually part of step 2, but it would hardly be a South Park reference if I specified step 2. Recruiters will contact you, either with a job in mind or just to get you in their system. From my small sample size, it's often the bigger agencies that call you before they have a job in mind, so it's worth doing. They will then send you on interviews, and eventually you'll impress someone enough that they will attempt to suck out your soul via your brain offer you a job, which will eventually lead to profit, unless, like many Americans, you spend more than you earn, in which case you're still in debt.

Posting on dice is pretty straightforward: you upload a resume and register as having specific skills. Add as many as you can reasonably claim. The big question for me was my privacy settings- initially I hid my contact info, but after I hunted around, it looked like the info was only available to companies with dice Employer accounts, not every stalker with library access, so I opened it up. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect recruiters, especially at individual companies rather than agencies, want to see that you're a real person before they contact you.

After that, it's the usual routine: respond professionally to inquiries and follow up in a reasonable time frame. You'll get a lot more contacts this way, so you can calibrate things like how much money to ask for, which some people (never me, a paragon of reason and prudence) occasionally need.