Blog Post: Cool Tools: Smart phone apps to recharge your job search

It’s official: Americans love their Internet-enabled “smart phones.” According to the New York Times, Gartner, a research business, projects that sales of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other models will increase 25 percent this year. That’s an amazing statistic when you consider the amount of people who have been “downsized” out of a job, but according to the article, the ability to send and receive e-mail and other instant forms of electronic communication is part of the reason some job-hunters consider it a necessity.

Reporter Steve Lohr writes:
“For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smart phone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.”

Much of your ability to use your smart phone as a mobile career center hinges on finding applications and Web sites that work with your particular phone. Here are a few apps and sites that others have recommended or found useful for job-search tasks. A caveat: not all are free.

iPhone apps
BeamME lite: an application that allows users to send virtual business cards. "Vcards" can be sent to devices via SMS and email.
LinkedIn: The iPhone's mobile browser for LinkedIn allows users to take their professional network with them wherever they go. Users can have immediate access to their contacts and important updates, such as when someone in their network posts a lead for a new open position.
Resume PRO: This app, which retails for $1.99, allows job hunters to create a PDF resume on your phone by inputting personal and professional information. The app also features a generic cover letter you can include when you send your resume.

BlackBerry apps
RDM+: Remote Desktop for Mobiles: This app has a hefty $39.95 price tag, but it also lets you control your desktop computer from your smart phone. No more “I forgot to e-mail myself the cover letter/resume/CV, etc.”
Google Sync: This free app will synchronize your Google Calendar and contacts with the built-in applications in your BlackBerry.
Viigo and Vlingo: Two apps that sound alike, yet function differently. Both have a place in a job hunter’s smart phone.
Viigo is a full-featured RSS feed reader that lets you keep up with important news wherever your day takes you. You can add your own feeds, which means it’s easy to create a job-hunting dashboard for your phone. An updated version of the app now in beta testing, adds support for custom search alerts (for example, on news of an potential employer) and even podcasts.
The speech-recognition app Vlingo goes far beyond dialing numbers from your address book. You can run voice-directed Web searches, launch built-in BlackBerry applications, compose e-mails and send text messages. Vlingo takes over the application key on the side of your BlackBerry, making it easy to access even while driving.

BlackBerry users can tap into LinkedIn, too, but there is no native app for them as of yet.