Looking for a job is a time-consuming experience? According to Money, it takes around 65 days for employees to fill healthcare roles - time you could use doing something else.
This situation is ushering in a host of apps that promise to save job seekers time. The idea here is mainly to automate many of the tasks that get in the way of your job hunting. Some apps directly relate to the search process itself - such as writing your resume for you - while others deal with things like booking holidays and managing your schedule.
It’s a promising move that should (hopefully) improve how you use your time. With it, you can say goodbye to the old days of putting off job searches because you’re overwhelmed and hello to greater efficiency.
So what are the best time-saving apps for job seekers?
Writing an effective resume is a time-consuming experience. If you’re not used to it, it can take many hours. And sometimes, it still doesn’t sound great even after putting considerable effort into it.
Fortunately, services like TopResume exist that will write your resume for you, based on the information you provide. According to their internal data, their services make you 32 percent more hirable - so certainly something worth considering.
The basic idea is pretty straightforward: you hand over your details - perhaps in the form of a bullet point CV - and a professional writer will create a beautiful narrative that will help grab your future employer’s attention.
The service offers one-on-one support and a resume that tells the story of your career. Quite bravely, it also guarantees double the number of interviews - great for those struggling with this stage.
TopResume says that a great resume is an excellent foundation for any application process. Often, the best candidates don’t get the opportunities they deserve because they’re not putting themselves into writing adequately. TopResume corrects this and eliminates this annoying admin job for you.
While a lot of people in the healthcare industry have fabulous resumes, they can struggle at interviews. It’s not that they don’t know their stuff - they do. It’s more that they don’t understand the approach they should take when they meet prospective employers in person.
The purpose of JibberJobber is to correct this. The service is the creation of Jason Alba, a man who failed to succeed in his job search back in 2006. Alba realized that many people were struggling to get hired because they didn’t know how to systematize the interview process. He saw that people of all industries, including healthcare, lacked the selling and communication skills they needed for success.
JibberJobber was his response to this sorry state of affairs. He saw that he could help people move past the interview stage with simple coaching. The JibberJobber Search Program is an affordable 6-week course that teaches you where to find people for interviews, how to ask them for one, and what your responses to questions should look like. You learn some critical objectives for interviews. And you find out how to follow up with every interviewer in a way that makes it more likely you’ll land the job.
JibbnerJobber sounds like a time sink, but it is not. Consider how much time you can save if you approach the interview process more efficiently. When you have the right skills, you can land the roles you want instead of going through an endless application and rejection cycle.
CamCard is an invaluable tool for anyone in the healthcare sector trying to grow their network and find new job opportunities. The tool allows you to scan the business cards of contacts you meet, storing all their details in a single location, allowing you to call them up at the opportune time without having to fumble around for a piece of card.
Digitizing business cards is a more exciting concept than you first appreciate. It’s not just about going paperless. CamCard also facilitates e-card sharing, meaning that people in your network can share the cards of people in their network with you, and vice versa. In essence, it gives you a quickfire way to provide value to others and make connections - something that invariably cuts down on job search costs. You simply collect cards when attending conferences or seminars and then use them to conduct follow-ups afterwards.
On a practical level, this app is a real time-saver. Because it is cloud-based, you can access all your business cards from any device. And you can batch scan all your paper cards to eliminate clutter, making it more convenient.
Job seekers face a problem: they’d like to have time to search rigorously for new positions. But all too often, their existing work gets in the way. Pressures on their time relegate their search efforts to evenings and weekends. And often, they don’t want to spend their “leisure time” doing something that feels a lot like hard work.
For busy professionals, Trello might help. The productivity app promises to remove tedious tasks from your to-do lists and provide you with an overview of your application’s status at a glance.
The app works by organizing and prioritizing your tasks in a fun way, helping you stay organized. Trello mainly targets management professionals, but its service applies equally well for people conducting complex job searches. In the app, you can create cards corresponding to each application that you make. You can then see where you are at any given time in the process. For instance, you can create interview reminders and due date commands for application submission and so on.
You can think of Trello as a smart checklist. When you use it correctly, it ensures you’re doing everything by the right time, making it easier to meet employer requirements. If there’s a deadline for the application you have to meet, it’ll remind you, so long as you give it the information it needs.
Take a moment to think about how much of your day you spend doing menial life-related tasks. Managing your email inbox, organizing your calendar and booking holidays are all a massive chore and the last things you want to do after a long shift in the hospital. What’s more, they get in the way of the time you could be spending looking for better work.
Zirtual has a solution. The app allows you to outsource the organization of your life to somebody you trust, allowing you to focus almost exclusively on your career. Zirtual virtual assistants can do practically anything for you that could potentially eat up your time.
Healthcare professionals stand to benefit primarily from Zirtual’s event planning and travel booking services. But the outfit also offers research - significant for people looking for jobs - and expenses and invoicing for healthcare professionals who charge individual clients. It even provides content marketing, meaning that independent professionals can spend less time writing and more time catering to their patients.
Healthcare professionals in management or independent positions frequently find themselves spending their time filling out timesheets, which reduces the amount of time they have to search for new work. But Timely has a solution: AI-assisted time logging.
The app is essentially a bundle of tools that help take the “sting” out of tracking billable hours. It automatically tracks the time you spend in client meetings and keeps tabs on your GPS location so it can tell whether you’re at your work or not. It also pulls data from your browser and email account, using it to fill in your timetables.
The time-saving features are quite impressive. For instance, the AI-assisted time logging means that you rarely have to fill out hours worked manually. You can whip up ready-made reports for your employer, showing them when and where you worked. And managers can use the app to fill in timesheets for healthcare staff under their command quickly.
Do you ever struggle with procrastination when job hunting? If so, then Focus Keeper can help you cut down on time wasted and significantly improve your productivity.
The app relies on principles borrowed from the Pomodoro Technique. You work for a set period - perhaps 25 minutes - and then you take a well-earned break. It starts with picking a task you need to accomplish - say applying for a new position. And then, you set your timer and focus on working on it for the specified period. Then, when the timer rings, you take a five-minute break before starting over again.
The app offers a bunch of features to help you maintain your focus. So, for instance, if you’re on a roll, you can skip the break and work straight through.
Focus Keeper wants to reward you for your hard work as much as possible, too. It provides you with detailed reports and statistics on how you’re spending your time and calculates what proportion of it you spend working productively. It also tells you things like what percentage of your time you’re spending on your projects’ particular aspects. So, in the case of looking for work, it shows you how much time searching for roles is taking up versus writing your resume.
You can also do interesting things, like set app whitelists, so you only get notifications from apps that directly contribute to your productivity. And you can get the app to issue you with reminders, telling you that you need to start a new application.
Remember the Milk has a humorous name, but it makes an important point: many busy people struggle to keep up with their to-do lists. There are just so many pressures on their time.
The app, therefore, tries to make managing your life easier so that you have more time to dedicate to your job search.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the app is that it gets your to-dos out of your head. You don’t have to remember to call so-and-so at 5 pm - it’ll remind you to do that for you.
It also comes with tools that allow you to enter your tasks in a single line and include information on priorities, due dates, repeat tags and more. Reminders are available anywhere you have access to the internet, including Hangouts, Skype, Twitter and Gmail. And you can use it across multiple platforms.
If you have a complicated task eating into your time - like a job application - you can break it down into several subtasks. So, for instance, if a particular employer has a complicated application process, you can break it up into manageable, time-relevant chunks and pretty much automate the whole thing - no need to consult your calendar.
If you have a family, the app also lets you organize things together. You can send reminders to your partner to ask them to pick up the milk on the way home from work if you forget. And you can create timetable events that you can share with other people, reminding them when the time comes.
When it comes to time-saving apps, healthcare professionals are spoiled for choice. Today, you can get apps that make managing your application and life outside of work much more comfortable.
The technology behind many of these platforms is improving all the time too. Artificial intelligence is already making its way into many of the apps we discussed on this list. And it will likely grow in their capabilities in the future.
Many apps change entirely the way you see the job-hunting process, too. Having somebody create a resume for you is often a much more efficient use of your time than sitting down on a Sunday afternoon and trying to do it yourself. Plus, you’re much more likely to get something that actually works - thanks to all their specialist knowledge.
We hope these apps help during those busy days as healthcare work can definitely feel overwhelming. But you more than likely didn't choose this line of work because you were scared of being busy and having fast paced days. You did it because you care about people and have an urge to help them. But, if things are at the point where no app in the world could win back one minute in the day, I guess there are some different and slower paced careers out there...how about one in art?