What is one of the most daunting and demanding things an adult gets to do in their life? Some of the aspects of adulting include buying a home, raising children, or purchasing a car. Right now, I’m facing one of the most daunting things of my life, and that is a job search. The job search is a process that has many, many moving parts and I need a tool to help me manage the job search. Enter Nimble, a CRM that I have found to help me in my search.
What exactly is a CRM? A CRM stands for customer relationship manager. This is a tool that most people in sales and marketing roles are familiar with, because they have been and use a similar tool to make sales, grow a business, and increase something in their career. You can use the same system for a job search. After all, a job search is very similar to a sales. In this post, I’ll share with you my top five reasons you should also be using Nimble for your job search.
Sales is a pretty straightforward process. There is prospecting for leads, identifying target companies, meeting decision makers, and closing the deal. Yes, it’s probably a little more complicated for some, but the general concept is the same. You need to know what job you want, where you want to work, who works at the places you might be interested in, and then looking for opportunities either posted on a careers page, or those coveted job openings not yet posted.
I’ve used a lot of CRMs in my job search. But, I like Nimble and here are the five reasons why.
“Stay in Touch” with prospects in your Job Search
In sales and the job search, it’s important to stay on top of someone’s mind if you are serious about making the sale or landing a job. Where every other CRM system excelled at capturing a person’s data, it failed in providing me a system that would tell me to contact someone at an interval I specified, like, bi-weekly, monthly, etc. All the other systems I tried didn’t allow me to do that. Instead, I would need to manually schedule those calls. What a pain…
Nimble has a feature called, “Stay in Touch” where you can set an interval where you contact your person or company to ensure you don’t fall through the cracks. I think this alone makes Nimble worth using exclusively.
Pipelines for Leads in your Job Leads
My university job coach says that I need to apply to 200+ jobs a year to land. That means that I need to apply to roughly one job every two days in the span of a year. That’s a tremendous amount of applications to create and track. Viewing this as a sales job, it’s helpful to use the pipeline method. When I signed up for Nimble, I created a basic pipeline with different stages in the job search, outlined below:
- Job Lead Discovered – This phase is where I find the job posting online or hear about the opening from my network
- Job Applied – this phase is where I apply for the job
- Phone Screen – a phone screen is conducted
- First Interview – a first round interview is held
- Second Rd Interview – a second round interview is held
- Job Offered – I was offered the job
- Job Lost – I did not get the job
I can track where I am in each of my application’s process so I can follow up and stay focused on my search. At any time, I can know where I am in the job search process.
Chrome Extension to Capture Information
Let’s say you just searched for people who are alumni of your school who work in a certain company. When you want to add them to your CRM and contact them, most of the time it means toggling back and forth from one browser window to another. What a hassle.
Nimble has developed a Chrome browser extension that lets you capture your contact’s details into the CRM without leaving your browser and your person’s listing on LinkedIn or the company website. This streamlined workflow helps me save time and effort in building my personal network.
Email Sending and Tracking With Nimble
Another great thing I love about Nimble, is that I can send emails to my contacts without leaving the app. I simply integrate my email services through gmail and I’m ready to send messages to my contacts. I can send to a group of contacts or I can send to many. It’s like having an email marketing service inside of a CRM. I enjoy seeing the notification that someone has opened the email that I sent and my messages are being opened and read.
Conclusion
The job search process is daunting, challenging, and hard. Fortunately you can use a CRM to manage it. My recommendation is to use Nimble for your job search because you can keep in touch with people you want to stay top of mind with, create pipelines and a process for followup on your submitted applications, use their Chrome browser extension to streamline your workflows, and finally, send and track emails to contacts in your job search.
If you want to get started using Nimble for your job search or for your business, I’d recommend you click here to get started. We’ll both get $25 to use for our subscriptions!
