Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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