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Honest Job Sites?
theirpuppet asks: "I've hit every job site I can find, and it's pretty much impossible to find an honest one. Dice displays the same ads regardless of whether you want the last day's postings or the last week's. Monster sells your email addy to every spammer in the universe. The other ones lie about the amount of viable postings that they have, or they just rip them from Dice/Monster. Where are the honest ones, worth visiting? Yes I know the tricks, don't give your email addy out, apply to the companies directly. But it's not the point. Spending hours a day combing through the same ads over and over in search of one that might be new is ridiculous!"
...but I am looking for a new job just now, and I don't want you to find it!
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
There was life before the internet you know? ;)
That said, good luck in your job hunting!
There are none in my opinion.
The best "job site" I have found is networking the old fashioned way. Calling up old friends and looking around. My parents, friends, their friends, etc. etc. Also, you'll be surprised how easy it is to walk into some places and just ask questions.
Don't settle for that "have you looked at our website?" excuse either, nine times out of ten, that thing isn't updated, ask to talk to someone important. It's a down economy, but good, smart people are always hard to find.
I found my job about a year ago, and I _still_ get calls/emails from the Monster.com Spam Lover's Club.
What makes you think monster sells email addresses to spammers? I've been using the same email account on monster for three years. that account is dedicated specifically to monster.com usage, and i've NEVER gotten any spam in that in box.
other then that, word of mouth is the best way to go. just ask everyone! be it someone you know or not. some jobs have openings that never hit websites or papers etc, they just wait for the right people to come along.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
Employers aren't desperate for employees. They have a little time to choose and lots of candidates. It's going to be harder for a stranger to get hired. Network baby... If you are unemployed, take that entry level position, and hope for a shining letter of recomendation. Then apply for that real-tech job. I'm a perl developer... I worked as a secretary at my current job, and the applied for my real job as a perl developer.
I have 4-5 years of perl development experience, and this is what I had to do to get in. If you are unemployeed, be shameless. If you are just looking for a job upgrade, network. The old rules apply now. It's no longer an employees market.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
not that i've gotten a job from anything i've sent through craigslist, but the postings there seem rather more like actual existing job openings than the "let's send out our weekly advertisement on hotjobs" listings.
Your newspaper's classifieds are indicative of the market. Don't see any tech jobs in there? Then there probably aren't any -- at least none they're considering unsolicited candidates for. Start looking at temping and be prepared to take some truly crappy and short-term jobs in that field...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I just landed a job after 7 months of unemployment, I found that most of the major sites (Monster.com, etc.) didn't really help, although I did get a few calls (Most were for jobs I wasn't even remotely qualified for). I live in Upstate New York and was lucky to find a local site http://www.davincitimes.com/ that concentrated on Engineering and Technical job listings and found my new job through them.
Local headhunters that specialize in specific career areas are helpful but you need to call them constantly so they have your name fresh in their heads. Another I found useful was the local newspaper web site that had career listings in just this area. While looking at specific employers web sites pay attention to where they say they post jobs, a lot of employers I looked at didn't post jobs on their web site, they used another "Career oriented" specialty site.
Good luck.
Signus X-1
THANK YOU for saying something that really needed to be said.
http://www.computerjobs.com
Its getting pretty typical for hearhunters to do a bait and switch on the postings. Since September, 2001, its been getting worse and worse. Jobs are listed on Dice with outlandishly high salaries (for what they are), just so a headhunter can increase their resume-base. I've called on a number of those hours after they were posted, and I get "Oh, that position is no longer available, but what about this other horrible job?"
Its horribly dishonest, and I've had better results from a local paper every time. I've also seen pretty good results from net-temps, although I haven't looked there in months.
Good luck!
-Turkey
How is it that the most legitimate source is ridiculous? Ads in the paper are by companies truly looking for someone to hire, not just thinking about maybe hiring someone, as alot of online job sites end up listing. Not to mention that the number of people that reply to newspaper ads is ever shrinking, making your chances of an interview very high.
Of course, if you go into an interview with the same attitude problem you display here, it could be a long wait indeed.
Now is not the time for being picky or elitist. If a company is in business right now, and has been for a few years, they might be stable enough to make it through this drought right now.
Bite the bullet, take a job that is not perfect, and spend your leisure time away from work looking for the "perfect job."
Chances are, there are many people that are in your immediate area that are immensely more qualified than you are, and realising that this is the time to eat some crow.
Also, check out the headhunters in your area. Avoid the newer ones that do most of their stuff online too. The crusty 60 year old guys who've been doing this for 20 or 30 years have the best networks imaginable. Use them to your advantage, they don't get paid until you get a job, and the money usually comes out of your new employers pocket.
The job placement industry is, alas, dominated by moral and technical morons. Yes, there are serious, ethical headhunters who actually try to meet the needs of employers and workers. But they are few and far between. Most are depressingly similar to spam advertisers. They don't care how much of other people's time they waste with cold calls, resume flooding, and sending people to interview on jobs they have no hope of getting. Just as long as they place enough people to meet the rent.
Last time I tried to find a job through techies.com, they allowed you to restrict your search to jobs offered directly. But that was 3 years ago, and they seem to have droped that feature. Cut too much into their revenue stream, I guess.
You simply have to connect directly with the employers. Google is indispensible for this purpose. Every day, do a search on your title and qualifications, and throw in a few keywords that companies tend to use on their jop openings pages, like (duh!) "opening" and "careers".
You should also troll local company sites directly. Make a list of likely employers in your area, and go to their web sites every day. That's how I got my current job.
Have you looked at the help wanted ads lately? In technical jobs, they're as bad as the online listings -- full of headhunter spam.
As a former hiring manager at various dot coms and now CEO of my own, I can tell you that I would never bother to put an ad on a job site. Doing so would just be asking for a barage of emails from people I have no interest in hiring. The only effective way I have found is to network. I always get my people from user groups or from mailing lists I am apart of. If in the rare case that I can't find someone from those two places then I use a recruiter. Not any recruiter mind you as only good ones are worth their weight. For those who care, I am currently using the services of WaveStaff, which is a company started by my former agent.
Try Flipdog
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
It's not that sites like Dice aren't honest: it's that they're vulnerable to being gamed. The "same old job postings" you mention are being reposted nightly by a bot, so they show up as new postings. I looked at a few some months ago and discovered that they even change by a few unimportant characters, which thwarts simple-minded attempts to catch this.
I am currently completing the beta testing of http://consultutah.com's new site. (Mine)
I am a senior developer at a mid-sized company in Utah. As we were trying to hire people, we received millions of calls from "headhunters" wanting 25-35% of the person's first year salary!
I, then, started ConsultUtah LLC.
ConsultUtah.com will do the following:
1. Never give out your personal information to advertisers
2. When a company wants to contact you, you will receive an email asking if you want to give that company permission to contact you
3. We charge 10% of the person's first year salary (to the hiring company) and that percentage can be negotiated based on volumn.
Right now I am accepting emails addresses to notify you when we go live. (November 1st) You will only receive a single email from us, then our knowledge of your email address will be blown away...
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
Flipdog rocks. Best job website I've seen by far.
--Be human.
They can take your resume, parse it out, and then send you a lot of job position descriptions. Very easy. Plus, they have tens of thousands of jobs.
With "Plain Old Text" a carriage return creates a new line. You shouldn't need an HTML break.
If you want more spacing between paragraphs, just add another blank line.
My advice is include the job boards in a small % of your search, say 15% and spend the rest of the time networking w/ good honest recruiters from the smaller niche firms and selling your skills directly to hirirng managers. Remember, a recruiter has to sell sell sell to get their foot in the door and so do you. Snoop around, make calls into companies, find out the org. structure and target your search accordingly. Don't even bother wasting your time w/ HR (human resistance) and go to the source, the hiring manager who is in need of some help. This is how you will be heard and be seen. Compare this to being resume # 299,563 in some huge db. Hiring managers are also up to their ears in resumes and a phone call could quickly get you to the top of that stack.
If you live in Southwestern PA, USA, be sure to hit The Pittsburgh Technology Council. This is a collaborative site of most tech companies in Pittsburgh and vicinity. Many of those companies post positions here.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Have you considered doing any sort of contract/consulting type work? Sites like elance and Rent-a-Coder have many small, medium and large projects available. This is an interesting way to bid on projects that have been outsourced by other companies.
I have a fair amount of experince with sites like these both from an employers and well as a prospective employees perspective. And in my opinion they really aren't worth the trouble.
From the employer perspective we get something like 400 resumes for every posting. 375 of them are useless. The people are severely underqualified, way over qualified, live outside of a reasonable commuting area, have unrealistic salary requirements etc. Because of the ease of submission, or perhaps because they can't read we get all of these useless resumes. That makes it harder for us to sort, and less likely that we'll be able to spot the best candidate before becoming fatigued
From the prospective employee side, everytime I send a resume I know that 500 other people, most of whom aren't qualified have sent resumes for the same job. OTOH whenever we run a newspaper only ad, or when I have replied to newspaper ads, we get a small number, of almost always qualified applicants, and as an applicant I almost always get a call back
I'd recommend using all of the traditional methods, friends, family, classified etc. And if you're going to send a resume, if they dont speccify email, send one printed, it gets far more attention
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
FlipDog searches companies' own websites.
Pro: Stuff you'll never see anywhere else, even the local paper
Con: Their listings are usually a few days or a week old so in today's market they're often already filled!
Pro: No headhunters!
Con: No headhunters...
Pro: No spam!
Con: Their interface is a little clumsy and sometimes the search bot doesn't grab the ad correctly. It's easy enough to just click directly to the originating site though.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is the one I like. It attracts employers since it charges waaay less than Monster.com, and it links you directly to the company's job postings on their own web site.
In other words, they don't have any job listings, they just provide you search services.. And hey, you gotta love the fact that it's non-profit and they don't even force you to set up an account.
drawback - they don't store your resume either.. you are actively searching (as you should be! don't wait for jobs to come to you)
AJB
As honest as it can get..
America's Job Bank, run by the gov. Has all the jobs from the departments of labor around the US. Plus other gov jobs, and alot of private industry. There's alot of crossover from moster and dice and the like, but some stuff thats not on either of those. Plus, its one of the few that has virtually every single type of job out there.
On the down side, the interface is horrible. But that will be changing soon..Don't bother with Job Scout, it doesn't work right.
Ironicly, the company that runs the website (ClearBlue, formally AppliedTheory) laid me off in January. (don't worry, I recently found other employment.)
Good luck in your job search (now I feel like spam)
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Weird, definitely. They must have a broken pattern somewhere. Anyway, as far as I can remember, the 'Extrans' option has been around as long as I've been on Slashdot. Judging by my user ID number, it's longer than it seems. :-)
Oh well. BTW, I did some investigation, and looked at the HTML that Slash is producing. Here's something that's curious looking. Notice the <nobr>, <wbr> and </nobr> tags?
It would appear that the weird handling of "." and "/" at the start of a line are part of some misguided word-break-control attempt. I mean, as best as I can tell, the tag sequence is a no-op. Perhaps it's worth filing a bug against Slashcode?
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
If you're looking for a job with Perl, I've heard good things about jobs.perl.org. I have no personal experience with the site, however.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Try your local newspaper. Some papers will even let you search online if you are too lazy to go buy a paper.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Try the NH Jobs List for a variery of New Hampshire based jobs (with a high percentage of IT related postings).
Links are provided directly to the hiring company. Heavily moderated (no get rich quick postings allowed) and spam free. This list was created to combat most of the problems already listed here.
Disclaimer: I'm not associated with the company in any way.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Will get into this business. They have the speed, the tech know-how and the honesty.
I've been out of work for almost all of 2002.
As was stated above - Dice is almost worthless after the first time you search it. The market here is just awful. No jobs that I can find anywhere, and those that are available have 10k applicants.
Anyhow I'm a Senior UNIX admin and network/system security expert seriously seeking a job in Denver!!!
HELP!!!
sedawkgrep
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
Agreed,
Sometimes you have to go for the bite and tag that lower-end. I'm an IT Administrator (actual title). Actually, it's a small business, with a routered internet connection, and about 6 computers. I do a lot of programming custom software though, but the IT Admin part rarely bothers me as keeping things patch usually prevents breakage and the other employees are relatively informed.
I don't get paid a whole whack of money, surely not as much as many other "IT Admins" do. But they appreciate my work, and having IT Admin on my resume along with glowing recommendations certainly helps in the long run.
I definately see the secretary to programmer thing. Sometimes all it takes is a foot into where you want to work, and a little patience.
X many years ago if you went to college and got a piece of paper, it got you a good job. I think employers finally got royally sick of all those that couldn't actually pull the weight of that piece of paper. Until we get rid of all the losers that are getting shoved through IT programs (people with degrees who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag), then we'll continue to have a lot of really overqualified secretaries.
It's nice to see I'm not the only one that faced this problem. No matter what one's experience, without a lot of really good recommendations a resume on monster is only get an inbox full of spam. I tried and that's all it got me, until I started looking at the lower rungs on the ladder.
Power to the overqualified secretaries, you'll get that promotion when you FSCK the super-important linux server that the MS-certified geek keeps looking for a GUI on - phorm
At first, I took my lower paying job and let it pay the bills. I also work some contracts on my own, run online under phormix (which sadly enough, leaves me little time to re-edit my own .com webpage). The contracts get the goody money, the rest pays the bills. If you're good and get referrals it works out quite nicely.
Small things lead to bigger things - phorm
In a month
Number of interviews from local newspaper ads - 9
+ Number of interviews from online ads - 0
= Never looking at online ads again.
It has become an annoyingly common fact that the online resources, once revolutionary and powerful are now junk. The jobs are always filled, and that is the 1 in 1000 submittals that get a response. The only way to move jobs now is through local papers and personal networking (in my area at least).
Just my 2/100 of a dollar.
Knightfall
I recommend regional based sites! For example, here in the People's Republic of Maine, we have "jobsinme.com", and "southernmainehelpwanted.com". Screw monster and those other whores ... the good jobs are listed a bit closer to your own home area.
... google search, and AM radio ads will usually throw the URLs around.
As far as locating regional job sites that apply to you
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I live in Williamsburg, VA, commuting distance from both Norfolk and Richmond. But the local papers are pathetic for tech jobs. Now, if I was in the medical professional, damn there are a lot of ads for that industry down here.
Now, when I lived outside of DC, the Washington Post was great for finding work. In fact, all my jobs up there came from the Post.
But where I live now, the onlines are really my only option, other than networking.
Now, if I move to Vegas next year like I'm planning, anybody know what the newspapers are like out there?
FFS! How can this be offtopic?
Pixels keep you awake!
check out Mojolin (http://mojolin.com). International linux unix and embedded jobs. I've gotten several jobs both contract and perm (including my current) through there.
Umm... I don't think so. I have yet to receive a single spam addressed to the address I used for Monster.com. net-temps, however has. I use unique addresses for each place I put my resume up, or submit an application to.
In fact, net-temps is the only place I've received spam from.
(No, I don't want to pay you $70 to have your automated system tell me about my resume, when I can just have my career counselors to do it for free.)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Adding to the lists: directemployers.com. This site was set up by many companies which were tired of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to other job sites. Participating companies include Google, Sun, HP and more. Searches link directly to a company's web site.
I am desparate. I ahve, like you, used dice.com, monster.com and a bunch of others that many posters have already mentioned. But in this economy I cannot find a job.
I am 27 years old and am living with my parents. Mostly unemployed, taking the ocassianal minimum wage temp job building computers in an assembly line just to have money to pay for car insurance, gas and food.
I am very seriously thinking about joining the Navy/AirForce. Hell, after a four year tour of duty the economy should be better, shouldn't it? And then I canuse the GIbill to go back to school and get a Masters degree.