05.01.07

Salesforce.com and Job Hunting

Posted in business, life, tech at 5:22 pm by mridley

It’s not well advertised on their web site, but Salesforce.com offers a free Personal Edition of their salesforce automation software.  I signed up for an account a while back because I was curious what the package was like.  Salesforce.com gets a lot of ink in the trade press for their innovative software as a service hosted model for enterprise applications, but I’m not a sales person so I had never happened to have reason to use it myself.

I’ve had my account for a while, but I never really did anything with it.  See the part above about my not being in sales.  I don’t like signing up for test accounts and not actually testing anything, and I kept trying to think of something I could use the Salesforce account for.

It turns out, I have found an application for Salesforce in my life: job hunting.  I have recently become unemployed and have been on the job hunt.  My typical method is to save copies of all resumes emails I send out to a special folder, along with reply correspondence.  I make notes of the phone calls I have with recruiters and hiring managers on various slips of paper and backs of envelopes, which I then promptly misplace.

Salesforce is software to help sales professionals keep track of leads, document conversations, and drive sales productivity.  Well, I am selling myself in this case, so why wouldn’t it work for me?  So for the past few days I have been using my Salesforce.com personal edition account to keep track of all the various companies I’m in contact with.  It’s probably overkill for my purposes, but it’s a fun test of the software.

Overall I’m impressed.  I haven’t spent much time looking at their online help (which is excellent), but I’ve been able to get the system to do what I want it to do.  I’m sure I’m using only a small fraction of the features, but it’s already helping me keep track of who I’ve talked to on a given day, when I said I’d follow up, etc.

I plan to keep using it until I find a job, and if I come up with any other great revelations about how the software works toward this goal I’ll let you know.

Tags: Salesforce.com, Job Hunting, Recruiting 

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