When searching for a job or career, do as much research as you can on a company.

Search company websites to learn about a company’s products, services, financial information, and the decision makers who may offer you a job.

Master various search engines and become a “power searcher” through your prowess of search engine search techniques.

Use search engines to look for information about the company's products and key personnel. If you are using Google use the advanced search features to make your web hunt more effective.

Here are some top tips:

to search for synonyms precede the word with a tilde "~"
for example searching for ~survey will find topics such as research, statistics, system and so forth.  This can save a lot of time on repeating searches for similar terms

to search for a specific name put it in quotes - "some name".  This will prevent the search engine finding documents where the first name and surname appear on the same page but not together.

don't forget to search the news and groups sections as well as the web. In some niches the newsgroups on Usenet can be a useful source of information.

use the numrange operator to specify a range of numbers 2001..2005 will find all results with 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. This can be useful in narrowing down a set of results.

you don't need to write "and" between words but if you want to do an "or" search you need to write the word OR in capitals. "marketing executive vacancies" will look for pages with all three words, "marketing OR executive vacancies" will find documents with marketing vacancies and executive vacancies (or all three words)

Once you have learned as much as you can about a company, send in you CV even if a job is not posted yet. Be proactive!