Don’t Wait For USAJobs.com To Tell You About The Government Jobs

Posted January 12th, 2010 by Fed HR Insider and filed in Federal Job Hunting
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A lot of times when someone starts the process of searching for a career with the Federal government on USAJOBS, they create a “Job Search Agent.”  The Job Search Agent periodically runs a job search based upon specified criteria and then notifies the person of matching jobs.

I’d offer the advice that rather than depend on the Job Search Agent, you go out to USAJOBS every other day or so and manually run a job search yourself.  I think this is important for a several reasons:

  1. Most people set-and-forget the Agent.  In other words, they forget to go back and review it to see if there are changes that can be made that might give more hits, with the end result being that they miss out on opportunities to apply for more positions.
  2. Depending on how often you set the agent to run, a position may open and close before you ever get notification – again missing opportunities to submit your Federal resume.
  3. When doing manual searches, you tend to think of ways to tweak your searches in ways that might give you more or varied results.  That doesn’t happen with the Agent.
  4. When you get in the system and do your searches regularly, you become more familiar with the Federal jobs that are being posted and how many.  For instance, if there were 90 Federal jobs fitting your search on one day, and 98 two days later, you’d more likely notice this if you were searching manually than if you were letting an automated system do it.
  5. The more you work with the system, the more you learn about finding potential jobs that  you might have the credentials for.  For instance, if you have an engineering background you may initially only be searching for Federal positions in the 0801 series (Engineer); however, after becoming familiar with the system, you would learn that a 0340 (Program Manager) position often requires and engineering background.  Now you know how to expand your government job search.

In the end, visiting USAJOBS on a regular basis to search for your Federal career will most certainly pay off with more opportunities.

To get more helpful tips like this download, the Federal Resume Toolbox.