Monday, December 29, 2008

Online Job Search

There are several major categories of job search resources on the web. By understanding these categories you can fully explore the resources that are available. Sometimes a web site may fit into more than one category.

Targeted Company Search

The best opportunity for the earliest lead is going directly to a target company. This is more work, but it yields the best leads. You can find the best target companies by noticing hiring trends in a local search engine.

Local Search

These sites focus on the local market, they are likely to have a higher "real" job content rather than recruiters trolling for resumes with bait and switch job lures.

In our area these two are the best:
CareerBoard - http://cleveland.careerboard.com/
Newspaper - http://www.cleveland.com/jobs/

Resume Posting

These sites allow you to post your resume where it can be seen by a large audience. Monster and CareerBuilder are two of the best known resume posting services. The advantage is an employer may find you for an opportunity you may never have known about. The disadvantage is control of your job search shifts away from you. You also loose the option of customizing your resume for a specific opportunity. Your generic resume may be reviewed and rejected by a perspective employer where a targeted resume may have survived the cut. Some of the local search engines may offer resume posting.

These resume posting services also contain a job searching advice section.

Integrated Search

There are super search engines that search many other job databases and return the combined results. Some Resume software (Winway and ResumeMaker) offer this kind of search. One of the best available on the Web is INDEED - http://indeed.com/ .

Advice

Some web sites offer very useful career advice. Some of these are:

About - http://jobsearch.about.com/
Career Voyage - http://careervoyages.gov/
Employment Spot - http://www.employmentspot.com/
Riley Guide - http://www.rileyguide.com/
Wetfeet - http://www.wetfeet.com/
What Color is your Parachute - http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/

Check out the Companion JebSeek Group Files section for over 100 pages of job search advice from one of the sites above.

So in summary, understand these various categories and seek out resources that are the best in each category to offer you the most in your search.

Status: Second Draft - Last updated 12/31/08 2:45 am

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree. CareerBoard is one of the best local job boards around!

Job Seeker said...

Anyone who has compared some of the large job search sites with stale postings, or recruiters trolling for resumes will appreciate Careerboard's fresh and real postings. I know it works, that's where my last job came from.

Thanks for your comment and take a look at the group companion page for some links on the "EC page" and over 100 pages of tips in the file section.