Networking, for the uninitiated, involves using your relationships and connections to achieve your goals. Specifically, learning about new job opportunities and applying for them through a network of contacts that knows you, values your skills and can vouch for you to potential employers. Networking has always been an important component of any job search, but these days it’s even more important with employers looking at hundreds of applicants for every position and seeking assurances that, if they pick you, they won’t regret it.

Networking involves building your relationships with the people around you. It means reconnecting with old bosses and colleagues, letting your family and friends know that you’re looking for a job (and what kind of job you’re looking for), and putting yourself out there, connecting with new people. Becomed’s goal is, as always, to help you organize and optimize. We want to help you maintain your existing relationships and build new ones. Over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing more and more functionality around these goals, starting with what we’ve release today.

As you may have noticed already, we’ve just released the first parts of this effort, which is event management. There’s a new section of Becomed now titled “Events”, where you can record the networking events, trade shows and conferences you attend. You can keep track of them and we’ll help you manage them through the new calendaring capabilities of our redesigned front page (the “dashboard”, as we like to call it). This will be the first start to help you get out there and build your network, and we’ll be adding more analysis and insight around networking events over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

The other part of networking is maintaining and tending to your existing network. We already have a way for you to keep track of your various contacts in our “Contacts” section, and we’ve recently added a way for you to rank your contacts by their importance to your career, but it doesn’t stop there. We have some exciting new features planned around your contacts that will help you keep in touch and reinforce your relationships, which we’ll release in the next few weeks as well.

As always, we thrive on feedback from our users and customers about what they’d like to see on Becomed. All of your suggestions make their way into the roadmap to make Becomed the ultimate job search organization and optimization tool, so if you have a suggestion for us please write us at feedback@becomed.com . We love your emails and we’re pretty good about responding on the same day.

Ok, now for the sexy parts – new features:

Goal Tracking

Job searching can be a daunting, frustrating task. Job search experts advise the unemployed to treat their job search like a job – keep a record of everything you’re doing, have goals and achieve them. Becomed has been helping with the first part since its inception, but now we’ve added a feature that allows you to easily create and maintain your job search goals. We’re going to start by tracking how many job searches you’ve been applying for each week and each month, and allowing you to set a goal. For example, you can decide that you want to apply to at least 5 positions a week; just let us know through your Profile page, and we’ll keep track and show you your progress every time you go into Becomed in a nice bar graph.

Because you’re already entering your job applications and progress into Becomed (right?), there’s nothing else you need to do except continue using Becomed the way you were doing – we’ll do the rest for you.

Importing Contacts from Gmail

Joshua Waldman from Career Enlightenment asked that we add a feature to import contacts directly from Gmail, and we thought that it was a great idea! We’ve now implemented this feature, and are working towards adding automatic contact imports from other services as well. Thank you, Joshua!

Giving Becomed a Face Lift

We’re definitely not graphic designers here at Becomed, but we’ve given the site a bit of a facelift over the last few weeks. We’re always trying to make the site look more appealing and friendly. We might not always get it right the first time around, but we’re giving it our best.

Stay tuned, we’ve got a lot more in the works. If you have a suggestion for Becomed, please send it to support@becomed.com . As you can see, we love and listen to our users.

Unemployment Reporting

Some states in the US require that unemployed job seekers provide a list of job opportunities they’ve sought when asking for unemployment benefits, to prove that they are actively seeking employment. Now, with Becomed, you can track which job applications you’ve already reported to the state simply by marking them. To use this functionality, simply go to the “Unemployment Report” section of the site.

Data Backup

Users have been asking for a way to download all of their data on Becomed, so that they can make their own backups and plug their information into other system. We back up the entire site every day, but since this is your data, we decided to make it easily available to you. To create an Excel-compatible CSV (comma-separated values) file with your job applications, contacts, companies, resumes and cover letters in it, just go to the Account Settings page and select what data you’d like to back up.

Other changes

We’ve made some minor cosmetic changes, as well as some other back-end changes to improve the operations of the site. We’ll be doing a more extensive overhaul of the inner workings of Becomed in the upcoming weeks, but that should be completely invisible to you (except for the new features that it will allow us to provide).

As always, if you have any suggestions for features you’d like to see in Becomed, please email us at support@becomed.com

And of course, these reminders appear on the front page (the so-called “Dashboard”) when you come in – we’ve even separated the job application reminders from the other ones (we call them  the “general reminders”) for your convenience. And of course, if you signed up to receive the daily agenda emails, they’ll be in there too.

Got an idea you’re aching to see in Becomed? Let us know by emailing support@becomed.com – we’re taking your ideas to heart!

We’ve also added a “Related Applications” section to resumes, cover letters, recruiters and references, which shows you which job applications link to them.

Lastly, we’ve made the code more robust by protecting you from accidentally assigning blank names to objects.

What should we do next? Drop us a line at support@becomed.com

[EDIT:]

We’ve also implemented a link between job applications to contacts, so you can note which of your contacts notified you of the job opportunity. Contacts also appear in the Analysis section now. This works pretty much like specifying the recruiter for a job opportunity.

We’ve also released the mobile version of Becomed, m.becomed.com . It is a version of Becomed.com optimized for mobile viewing, to allow you access to your active job applications on the go. For example, you can use it to review your application’s history and research while waiting for your job interview.

We’ve also introduced two new sections to the site:

• Contacts – allows you to keep track of your network of professional contacts. We’ve implemented a feature that allows you to export all your contacts in Outlook CSV from your email application or webmail providers and import them automatically into Becomed.
• Tools – allows you to search for job postings directly from within Becomed, and also links to other useful websites such as salary comparison sites and professional social networking.

We hope you like the new sections.

I’ve also implemented a better way to select dates on event and reminder pickers.

Enjoy.

• Better editing of notes and job descriptions
• Improved application page layout
• Ability to close applications, so that they no longer are listed as active applications
• and the ability to remove associated URLs from company pages

Every day, there are more and more improvements to the functionality of the site. If there’s a feature you’d like to see which doesn’t appear, please let us know.

Also, all emails sent from Becomed.com are now HTML emails (plaintext version also avaialble, for those using older or limited email applications). Hurray!