| For decades, people hunted for jobs by
scouring classified ads to clip all possible listings. They addressed
envelopes, stuffed them with copies of their resumes, drove to the
nearest mailbox, and waited up to a month for a reply. While Email and
the Internet haven’t killed off that time-honored process, they’ve
dramatically changed the rules. Electronically, job-seekers can hunt
for a new position anytime. And in a single afternoon of enthusiastic
E-mailing, they can offer their skills and experience to dozens,
perhaps hundreds, of firms.
While the Sunday newspaper can show how to contact
several dozen local companies that are hiring, E-mail and Internet
capabilities enable job-seekers to reach more than 30 million
potential employers. With this new technology, job-seekers are now
able to seek out and pursue jobs before they’re advertised in the
newspaper.
Equally important, these new electronic maneuvering
skills enable job-seekers to find organizations and individuals who
may be able to steer them toward the careers or geographic areas they
desire.
While many people today tout the Internet as the
best way to find jobs, for certain job categories, especially
high-tech, online certainly has its advantages. But is online job
hunting the be-all and end-all as it is often portrayed?
Job-seekers with little knowledge of the Internet
might think of an online job site as one central site offering access
to millions of job postings listed by employer, arranged by
geographical area and searchable by a variety of criteria or key
words. But more often than not, online job listings aren’t gathered
together on one site, but spread out over hundreds, if not thousands,
of sites.
It can be pretty overwhelming. Job-hunters need to
focus their efforts on sites that seem to offer them the best chance
of scoring a job offer, but how can they tell which sites are best?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. A site that paid off for a
friend or coworker might not yield even a single job to someone else.
Asking questions about which sites have worked and which haven*t
from fellow job-seekers is the best plan. Those sites which make it
onto listings recommended by legitimate job counselors should also be
good.
However, according to Dick Bolles, author of What
Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Guide for Job-Hunters and
Career-Changers only a fraction of the 16 million employers in the
U.S. job market are on the Web. Even the top five sites—Monster.com,
CareerPath.com, CareerMosaic.com,
Jobsearch.org, and HeadHunter.net—
each give access to only .06 percent of all U.S. employers
and 6 percent of all vacancies. And only a fraction of the 20,000
existing job titles are on the Web. And the majority of online job
listings* are only for job
titles in the computer, engineering, electronic, technological, health
care, financial and academic fields. Few vacancies in the rest of the
20,000 job titles are listed on the Web.
The hardest part of looking for a job online is
knowing where to start. The best advice is to seek out an online
listing site or two—or three. One place to begin is JobHuntersBible.com
a comprehensive Web site created by Bolles. This is, by far, the best
introduction to job hunting on the Internet, offering information on
search engines, gateway job sites, and much more.
Another site is JobWeb (http;//www.jobWeb.org),
which offers a list of links to nearly a hundred other job sites,
broken down by region. The experts who successfully guide
actual job-hunters in their search through job listings on the
Internet increasingly are finding that the key to a successful search
is found on the regional sites more often than on the big national
sites.
For the global job-seekers, Wide
Web Employment Office
has links to countries around the world. Also, its employment
opportunities are organized by occupation rather than by industry.
There are so many sites that it*s
wise for job-seekers to create a strategy for locating the right site
for their job-searching needs. The following sites may hold
important clues:
Within Yahoo!
job-hunters can go to Business and Economy/ Employment/Jobs,
where they’ll find more than 500 job site listings under six major
categories. Yahoo! also provides users with
Yahoo.Careers.
Yahoo.Careers
lists over 500,000 jobs. Users can search
for work using a keyword index, by geographic area or by job category.
The geographic area and job category are selected using a listing box.
After performing a search, Yahoo.Careers enables users to
further refine their search by keyword, company name or job title.
Yahoo!
also lists a
variety of job-related resources. In the moving resources, there*s
a salary calculator, a city comparison, rentals and houses for sale.
Other features include a daily column, industry research reports,
guides for job-seekers, company profiles, industry research, salaries
and benefits information, as well as advice on interviews,
negotiating, and entrepreneurship.
While Monster.com
doesn*t sound like an
employment resources Internet site, one quick glance will quash any
doubts. As of September, Monster.com contained nearly 239,000
job listings and a variety of other information. Here, users can
search for a job, post a job, research companies, create a customized
job search, and access similar kinds of employment matters. One of the
nicest features is the customized search, which enables users to
create an account that will track their employment interests against
new postings on the site.
For those working on their careers, CareerMagazine
is an excellent site, with plenty of front-end information to assist
with a career search. Job-seekers can read a feature of the week,
choose from any one of several daily topics, post to a resume bank or
look for jobs, employers and employment articles.
Career Relocation Corp.of America, an outplacement
and job-finding assistance company, developed America’s
Employers. The site builds on the company*s
years of experience in the field, providing job-seekers with plenty of
employment choices. Some of these include job search essentials, a
resume bank, advertised positions, a company database, relocation
resources and a job-posting center, plus links to job information
sites and recruiters.
The Web also contains several sites with tailored
employment classifications. One of these is The
Riley Guide,
supported by Drake, Beam, Morin, Inc. a national outplacement
consulting and career transition services firm. It provides an
excellent approach for finding the right Internet employment site. The
Guide lists a huge variety of Internet job resources under
major categories and includes an executive job search, help on
researching careers, salary surveys and resume help.
Networking on the Internet often means logging onto
newsgroups and other online forums. Newsgroups on almost any topic can
be found and viewed with Internet search engines such as Yahoo!,
Excite, and Infoseek. By letting others know they’re
looking for jobs, job-seekers just may make contact with just the
right person.
CyberFiber
claims
to have "the most comprehensive directory of Usenet and
alt.newsgroups." Its search tool allows job-seekers to hunt
through more than 40,000 newsgroups by subject.
Yet another approach to electronic networking is for
job-hunters to read magazines and electronic newsletters that focus on
the field, region, or company where they’re seeking employment.
Often, the published contact information includes E-mail addresses of
authors and other experts. But this technique shouldn’t be overused—no
phony praises, no wheedling information with incessant questions.
With all these resources plus the thousands more not
listed here, a job seeker may never have to look at the Sunday paper
again. |
