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I just found a job through flipdog.com. I found that flipdog consistently had more listings than monster or dice for my areas. Come to think of it, I found my last job a few years ago on monster. So -- it can work.

Try Flipdog

I've had the same resume' for years. I copied it from somebody when I was in the service (my first "real" job) because I thought it looked good. (I think he'd had it done professionally). Ever since then I've just updated it and in 15 years (and 5 jobs) never had a problem getting lots of good offers and basically being able to pick where I wanted to work.
Until this time!
Fortunately I wasn't laid off, but I did want to move on to more interesting work and it took me a freakin' year to land a good job!! (Lots of offers, all of them complete crap positions).
I used FlipDog as the best job source I could find next to my local newspaper. (Monster/Dice/etc used to be good, now the good stuff is buried a mile deep in crap that nobody wants).
But I also, finally, sent my resume' to these guys, er gals.
I paid the initial couple bucks for feedback only and decided that they at least knew what they were talking about so I gave them some more money (I think the final total was around $70) to just go ahead and do what they were talking about.
And when I got it I said Egads! That's horrible looking! Until I sat down and really read it. It wasn't a layout I would have chosen by any means, but the more I looked at it the more I realised that it was really a much more effective presentation of my skills as a recruiter or hr person would scan for them.
Any computer geek I'd ever shown my old one to said "Wow, awesome resume', come work for us!" and prior to this slowdown that was good enough - HR saw the key words, passed it on and the IT guys did the rest.
But these days it won't get past HR without that added edge.
So yeah, get it done. I really did pick these guys at random originally but they did a good job so I'm passing 'em along!

I'm a windows user pretty much, but I'm making a gradual transition of weening myself of MS. For example as a webmaster of several sites, since i've always been in charge of choosing servers, I have been able to leisurely learn how to navigate Linux through an ssh terminal.

Anyway, one of the first steps for culling the ms influence was to try to avoid the Microsoft browser. Unfortunately there are dozens of corporate websites that I have forced me to switch to IE because the website doesn't support alternatives. For example flipdog.com, a really cool jobsearch tool, doesn't support mozilla/netscape's browser and because they have faulty code from an old version of dreamweaver (so turning it in to bugzilla doesn't work) mozilla won't work (ironically it's only two lines of javascript that need to be changed!). I emailed them and so did a mozilla hacker and we got the response, simply, that flipdog does not and will not support mozilla/netscape. Now, the only way for flipdog to change their minds is if they see a large base of people coming in using m/n instead of IE or if a large number of people politely suggest to them an alternative. (Go to the main page of flipdog.com and click the "tell us what you think!" link.) The point is that even with something as simple as an html + javascript website this very useful and popular jobsearch tool is doing exactly what you said companies wouldn't: cut off their nose to spite their face, so to speak. but you assume that they care! "Ahh, so 1 in 100 people will have to close their browser window and open a different one. big deal! If it saves us money in development, I'm all for it."

for ms-loving companies that don't have the budget of ebay it might not be worth it to go against ms's plans without prodding. who knows.

FlipDog crawls the web and uses machine-learning technology to extract job listings from companies' web sites. You can then browse through them at their web site, filtering based on location, position category, etc.

The technology was developed by WhizBang Labs, and is quite cool. They basically take a small set of job listings that their crawler finds, have a human classify parts of the web page (job title, location, description, etc.) and then let their software program loose on it. It analyzes the human-filtered web pages, "learns" how to extract relevant data, and then uses that to classify all of the other crawled pages. Of course, this is over-simplified, but that's the basic idea.

(I'm not affiliated with them, other than successfully finding a job there.)

--Bruce

Best job search site around

I just got two jobs in the bay area one part time the other full time so it looks like the market is picking up, good luck.

When I went to college in fall of 2000, I decided to get a part-time job. I had worked for the previous year doing contract programming at a large chip company, and I had started my own small online (and profitable) business. However, I had just moved to a different city, and I didn't really know anyone who could get me a tech job.

I decided that an online search just might do the trick. Monster.com yielded nothing interesting, nor did HotJobs. As I was walking home from class one day I saw a billboard ad for FlipDog, and decided to try it.

After a quick and easy search focused down very specifically by city and job category, I found about four relevant jobs within three miles of my home. After a bit of resume touch-up, I e-mailed my resume to the interesting-looking employers. I received two e-mails back, one with an interview offer. I called the company and scheduled it for the next day.

In short, I had a job three days after my search on FlipDog.

As an aside to the story, FlipDog has some very cool technology developed at WhizBang! Labs. WhizBang! was headquartered in the same city that I attended school, and I got to go to a lecture about them. They have their web spiders crawl the web looking for job listings on companies' own sites. Then they use machine learning software to recognize and extract information (job title, location, description, etc.) from the free-form web page. That gets dumped into a database that FlipDog uses to help you find a job. Instead of making employers post available jobs on a special job site, FlipDog goes to the employers' own web sites and extracts job postings. Very cool. Check it out. (No, I'm not affiliated with them, except that they helped me find a job.)