The era of the perpetual job seeker?

Over the last several decades, the level of trust between employee and employer has corroded.  While there are many causes for this decline, the bottom line is most employers no longer hesitate to slash employees, and most employees do not hesitate to jump ship for better opportunities. And each party is fully aware of the other's intent.

So what does this mean for average Joes like you and me?

It means that your employer is going to continually look for new and exciting ways to squeeze productivity out of you (more on this to come soon).

And it means you are going to have to change from the traditional passive model of "job hunting when necessity strikes" to being ever vigilant and alert for new opportunities.

First, the easy part -- get your personal "brand" polished and ready to go at a moment's notice. At the moment, LinkedIn seems the be the primary mechanism to do this, tho other social media matter as well.  Whether you use Facebook or Twitter or some other site, these social media outlets need to collectively communicate your strengths, and hopefully few of your weaknesses.

Second, you need to find ways to always be on the lookout for that next gig. This is the real challenge -- traditional job posting web sites like Monster or Careerbuilder are tiresome to wade thru, as is Craigslist (which seems to be on the wane from its glory days as a job site) and newspaper sites. LinkedIn appears to have the lead here, but other than using your network to suggest connections, technologically it is not particularly interesting.

Jobfox is little more interesting in their approach. Sure, they have job postings as well, but you use your resume to build a profile on which the site performs an automated categorization of your skills.  This enables Jobfox to recommend jobs that you might not find on your own as the title, keywords, or details may be different from the kind of job you would normally search for. Of course, when you automate categorization it is rarely 100% (for example, my profile came back with Linux, which was not on my resume, as a skill -- and while I can fat finger my way around VI, I am by no means proficient).

A way to make the categorization more effective is by applying semantic technology. Being able to eliminate options that are in the wrong context increases the overall quality of the associations.  And the ability to mine for non-obvious associations provides insight into opportunities that would have remained hidden.

Bottom line, whatever the technology, being able to have relevant, quality, networked opportunities delivered to you as they occur will certain help you prosper in the era of the perpetual job seeker.