Surfing to Success · Issue 868

Whether you’re looking for a summer job or a graduate position, Jobs and Money takes you through some of the best websites for finding jobs

As the essay deadlines pass and exams come ever closer, students from first year to postgraduates are thinking about what they’re going to do over those long summer months, and beyond, to earn a bit of cash.

Jobs and Money presents a review of some of the best online resources we’ve found this year, and a few new sites to get you into the world of employment from the comfort of your own home.

Employment for Students

The founders of www.e4s.co.uk did extensive research with students to see what their ideal job website would contain, and then set about creating it.

It holds listings for temporary, part-time and holiday jobs as well as internships and overseas gap year positions covering sectors from charity to promotions.

The site also includes useful information about CV’s and interviews, contact details for recruitment agencies in your local area, and forums to discuss employment issues with students from all over the globe.

Set Your Rate

Jobs and Money found out about this site back in February and since then it has also been featured in The Times and The Sun.

In a nutshell, www.setyourrate.com is designed to let you sell your skills and services online, with no user charge.

So if you’ve got a flare for photography or you’re a fluent Spanish speaker, list your service and your price online and wait for the clients to come to you.

Service categories include computing, entertainment, languages and sport, and with 265 000 services viewed last month it’s worth setting up a profile.

Studious Enterpriseswww.studiousenterprises.com is a very clever creation by two marketing research graduates to get you to do their job from them. The up-side is you get paid for it too.

The idea is simple; you register with the site, and enter the contact details of family and friends who wouldn’t mind filling out a few questionnaires.

Then when the owners of the site have some research to carry out about products and services for their big-wig clients, they e-mail your loved ones with a survey and pay you for each survey that gets returned.

You’ll be rewarded £1 for every survey filled in by a student, and £3 for every professional response.

There’s also the opportunity to earn simply from giving your opinions about consumer issues using an online forum, and you’re compensated depending on the quality of your responses.

Finally, the site provides information on potential careers and jobs.

After filling out a detailed questionnaire about your education and preferences, they’ll match you to jobs that suit you, saving you hours of trawling through listings.

Source That Job

This is a slightly more specialist web site, but it’s a useful starting point for one of the most difficult industries to get into.

www.sourcethatjob.com brands itself as “the quick and easy media job website”, encompassing the fields of journalism, PR, marketing and advertising, and web/IT positions.

You can search by category or geographical area, and although most of the jobs are at graduate level, for those struggling to find positions in the media sector it’s a potentially great way of making contacts.

Be My Interviewer

To combat the danger of being left open mouthed and stumped for an answer in upcoming job interviews, use this web site to practice being grilled by some of the toughest interviewers in the public eye.

Bemyinterviewer.co.uk’s video simulations allow you to be questionned by the likes of Dragon’s Den entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne, GETgraduate Recruitment boss Kirsty McCulloch and ITV Talent Executive Moray Coulter.

Once you’ve been put through your paces, video tutorials allow each interviewer to tell you what their ideal answers would have sounded like, and an interview surgery forum feature means that you can ask any questions left unanswered.