You can use Google Alerts to your advantage when job searching. Google Alerts is a service from Google that sends you e-mail notifications whenever a topic you’ve specified gets mentioned online.
Here’s how this feature works: Google’s robots scour the web at an incredibly quick pace, finding new content, analyzing it, and indexing it. Google then sends the newly indexed web pages to your e-mail however frequently you choose to be notified. When Google alerts you, you get fresh content in near real time. Essentially, you get an e-mail when something new appears online related to the keyword you’ve set up.
Now that you know what a cool tool Google Alerts is, you can set up alerts for information on potential hiring managers. To modify those instructions for the purpose of getting the scoop on a potential hiring manager, just type the name of your targeted hiring manager in quotation marks rather than your own name.
Create a folder in your e-mail system to keep track of your Google Alerts about each specific hiring manager.
When analyzing the results of your alerts, look for the following information:
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News items you can mention during an interview or in an e-mail
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Similarities that you can lead with when you reach out to the person
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Articles the person has written or was mentioned in so you can congratulate her
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Red flags so you can determine whether the company is truly a match for you
