LIBRARY JOURNAL
reviews
By Gail Golderman & Bruce Connolly
GoinGlobal
GoinGlobal Inc.
online.goinglobal.com
Free trial available
CONTENT GoinGlobal delivers a comprehensive mix of resources for international citizens seeking career opportunities in the United States, as well as Americans looking for employment overseas. The file contains an employer directory with detailed company profiles along with contact information for leading U.S. and multinational employers in 196 countries. An exclusive H-1B Plus database that draws on 400,000 Department of Labor records, GoinGlobal identifies employers hiring international candidates for positions in the United States. (H-1B is a nonimmigrant visa that permits the temporary hiring of foreign workers with highly specialized skills.)
Users can discover internship opportunities, here and abroad, in every kind of corporate, public, or private setting, while a Jobs component of the site displays more than 16 million positions in various organizational settings and is searchable in English as well as in the local language of the region in which the position is posted. This area of the resource is updated daily.
Finally, there is a collection of Career Guides representing nearly 100 locations throughout the world. The U.S. City Career Guides area offers reports on nearly 50 cities, with sections on Finding a Job, Hiring Opportunities, Top Companies, Employment and Industry Trends, H-1B Visa Info, Getting the Job (Résumés and Cover Letters, Interview Advice, Work Permits and Visas), Professional and Personal Networking, and Living There (City Overview, Financial Considerations, Cultural Advice).
New to the fall collection of 29 Global City Career Guides. Considerably expanded from the six Canadian cities featured in the archive’s previous version, this section offers information and advice on job hunting and working in major cities in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
Also original to this upgrade is My GoinGlobal, which enables registered users to set up a personalized homepage for their saved Career Guides, job and internship searches (in order to receive email notifications when new positions matching their search are posted), and bookmarked job and employer listings.
USABILITY GoinGlobal’s appealing new homepage provides easy access to its various components, as well as to training videos, a user guide, FAQ, and dedicated search options for jobs and internships. A slideshow welcomes patrons and tells students, career advisors, study abroad prospects, people considering international internships, and recent alumni just what GoinGlobal can specifically offer them. Below that, the links to Career Guides, Job Search, Internship Search, the H1B database, and the Employer Directory are prominently repeated with brief descriptions of the content that may be found therein.
The Career Guides—countries, global and U.S. cities—are well suited for browsing, and their standardized organization lends itself to easy exploration. The guides make for interesting and entertaining reading, even for those who are not considering working overseas. Under Daily Life in the Kenya guide, visitors are warned that smoking is not only banned in all public places but that “violations can result in heavy fines or even prison sentences.”
We searched for humor office protocol in the Search Content box that appears throughout GoinGlobal, and received a long list of results from the Cultural Advice chapter of various Career Guides. Interestingly, the results page expands the search options to Keywords, Occupation, Country (required), and City. Upon reentering specific keywords, we selected Japan and the city of Tokyo from the pull-down menu and received no results. Changing to Dublin, Ireland, produced 17 hits, however, all of them in the Job Search database. (“Cool sense of humor and a personality that fills the room,” is the first requirement for one sales training position.)
The H-1B Plus database offers several search options: by Occupation, Job Title/ Keyword, Company, Year, plus City, State, and Metro area. We
typed “tech” in the Occupations box and selected “aerospace engineering and operations technician” from the list that was generated, and then
selected the years 2016, 2015, and 2014.
Rather than guess the areas where companies were submitting visa petitions on behalf of foreign applicants, we chose the State limiter but left the setting at All States. The search produced 43 hits, listing the job title, occupation, company, city/ state, metro, age, and year. Metro was the only heading that did not sort the items below, at least in the beta version with which we were working. The U.S. City Career Guides contain links to the H-1B visa companies for that metropolitan area.
The Employer Directory can be searched by industry, location, NAICS Code, company, annual sales, and total employees. We found employment opportunities using the keyword “journalism” in the city of Ithaca, NY. The list was fairly short yet on target. Internship Search is a separate feature in the new platform. Previously, Internships were an option in the Job Search feature; making it its own heading is a useful improvement.
Searchers can start by selecting the country in which they want to find internship opportunities, and then add a city, keywords, and age (of the posting). We selected United States and then Washington, DC. We then limited to immigration. The results list displayed opportunities with law firms and IT security companies as well as Human Rights Watch and Al Jazeera English.
PRICING GoinGlobal offers eight different subscription levels, all with their own pricing options. Discounts to consortium members can run as high as 50 percent, with the company providing special rates for multiyear subscriptions as well.
VERDICT The original version of GoinGlobal was a product that we already recommended, possessing valuable content for job hunters. Although the presentation was a little drab, the resource was easy to navigate and completely serviceable.
The overhaul is a complete success. There is fresh material in the form of the Global Career City Guides collection (plus a few new guides in the other areas) and new life in the product as a whole, thanks to the lively interface, improved navigation, increased search customization, mobile access, and the addition of a personal homepage.
Local administrators can take advantage of a dashboard, which makes checking usage statistics easier to accomplish. The result is that a good resource becomes even better. Any institution that attracts international students or that sends U.S. students to other countries to pursue internships and employment, will want to consider a GoinGlobal subscription.
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Gail Golderman (goldermg@union.edu) is Electronic Resources Librarian and Bruce Connolly (connollb@union.ued) is Reference & Bibliographic Instruction Librarian, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady, NY