Slashdot Mirror
Internet Job Boards a Bunch of Hype?
netglen brings us an article that discusses the reality behind online job sites like Monster, Hotjobs, and CareerBuilder. It appears that, while these sites may try to make you believe otherwise, they may not be the best bet in helping you find employment. netglen asks: "So, is this article accurate in its account on how poor these boards perform in finding [jobs]? This sounds pretty dismal to me. Two years ago, I tried Monster for the first time, and I managed to get a job on the first try. Since then I haven't gotten anything. Does anyone in IT even use these boards to look for a job?"
C'mon, look at the context. The name of the site is asktheheadhunter.com. Whose interests do they have in mind?
Also, more obvious, is the job market isn't what it used to be. Sure, it's harder to get a job now than it was a few years ago. But that doesn't mean that monster and the like aren't useful.
Now if netglen said "I compared Monster to my local papers' classifieds, and to the headhunters, and got a better response rate from the headhunters", that would be useful. Maybe netglen doesn't have any marketable skills. That doesn't mean monster isn't helpful.
The experience of myself and others I know is that job boards are better than headhunters, worse than going directly to a company's website. Most of us won't even talk to headhunters- they overpromise and overhype. Now that's irony, because that's what they say about the job boards.
I was a Sr. Oracle DBA, working for contract electronics manufacturing firm (CEM). We specialized (unfortunately) in Telcom, and the group I was with was in fact outsourced from a large telecommunications company. With the industry turn down, a number of the CEM sites were force to close and ours in North Carolina was one of them.
I had posted my resume on Monster, Hotjobs and Dice at the time -- actually about 2 months earlier to sort of feel out the market. Didn't want to leave early, since there were serious incentives to stay through your scheduled termination date. About 2 weeks prior to my last day I was approached by a local recruiting agency with an opportunity for a DBA with OpenVMS skills. Interviewed and was hired and started with them about a month later. Talked with the recruiter and they indicated they had found my resume on jobs.com which is Monster.
So I guess I had a positive experience with them, but this was in March of 2002.The unfortunate thing is that I now get what I consider spam from hotjobs, havent' been able to get off their email lists, and I now just let Mozilla dump them automatically in the spam bucked.
True story.
:)
My first (and only) shot at Monster was in August of 2000. I was getting sick of my $13.50/hr sysadmin job, so I posted to Monster on a whim. I had a call from the recruiting department of a global consultancy within 20 minutes. They offered me 55 up front. I didn't even really negotiate. Moved 300 miles to take it.
The punchline? We all got laid off in January. The Company disolved in June.
Use at your own peril?
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
I have found that the best place to find places (especially in the Bay Area) is Craigslist.org. Its the first place that everyone I know checks - and not just for jobs, but for housing, cars, and relationships! ;)
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
The only responses I've ever gotten from these boards was not from replying to a job posting, but posting my own resume and letting them come to me. It's easy, and IMO the best way to find jobs via those kinds of job boards.
Mark
My employer hasn't posted to any of those boards for ages.
Unqualified people from all over the world would apply for jobs they were obviously not suitable for yet HR has to keep all resumes on file for $FOO years (I forget the number)
They went from being a good tool to something that generated more work & filing than they were worth.
(This from a casual conversation with one of our HR people)
Trolling is a art,
Those online job sites are so filled with contract positions and work at home garbage that it's frustrating to do any kind of real search. The local newspaper uses career builder which is a little better because it's stocked with real classified ads that appear in the newspaper. Better to stick to something local than some national job search scam.
No, most IT people go to job sites that aren't job sites [like craigslist] which are under the radar enough not to be innundated with
- non-local job postings
- spam
- headhunting agencies getting contacts without offering jobs
- idiotic HR drone job postings
Craigslist worked for me on my recent job search. In less than two weeks I got 3 interviews and an offer (which I took) from the job section.
So you managed to get a job two years ago on the first try, but haven't been able to get a job since?
Maybe you're just not having any luck finding new work because you can't keep a job for more than two years...
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
spends 8 hours a day on monster's boards, been that way for 3 years...
As long as they're there and employers are posting jobs on them, you'd be a fool not to.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Add a extra period or space to your monster resume if its been stale awhile. It will flip a switch somewhere and youll get more inqueries.
an internet job boards is reduced to using that antiquated of mediums known as "television" to push their product.
I think a lot of people are turned off by the ridiculous job requirements and the blatant posting of non-existant posititions. Most people I know have gone back to what works best:
Networking with people you know.
A friend of mine is leaving her job next week. We've already talked about her bringing me on board if things look good from the inside.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
And to justify the loss of your salary when your boss catches you.
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
every job i have ever gotten has been out of personal contacts. i've tried monster, no luck. i decided to not quit school, just switched closer to home (left university for various personal reasons and took up ecpi; i'll go back to uni later maybe). today i just got a good job when i walked into a local store that i patronize often and am friend of the owner and his wife and the other employees. now i have a decent income for a student, and schooling.
the only interviews i got without personal contacts were via the richmond times dispatch wanted adds. those didn't pan out.
My first job out of college was from a recruiter who found my resume on Monster. The job after that was from a company who found my resume on Monster. My most recent job was actually due to a recruiter finding an 8-month-old resume on Dice, then placing me at my current job.
I have had virtually no success in directly contacting potential employers from their listings on online sites. On the other hand, I have had great success at companies and recruiters contacting ME from my resume being posted.
If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to leave your resume up there (while you're actively looking). You never know who might stumble upon it. YMMV.
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
Its usually used as a last resort.
When a job opens up, first they look internally for someone to fill it, then they go off a referal basis (and at this time, who doesn't have a few friends that are unemployed IT workers?), then they look locally in papers and such...
THEN they go out to a place like dice to find a job.
The market isn't "good enough" for them to work well. The market is a lot better than last year, but needs to build back up to happier times before places like monster will get you a job fast.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
These boards MAY be a good way to find a job. There is always a bit of luck involved. Although from my experience, nothing beats good networking.
The main problem with Monster (from the employer's perspective) is the absolute deluge of applications. We get 2000+ applications a month. Just wading through them is a full time job. The fact that we may miss a few is inherent to the problem. It's probably Monster's (and other's) biggest problem.
My boss asked me how much I thought I deserved for a raise...I showed him the, uh, "inflated" salaries on a couple of job finding sites.... It didn't work though...crap.
More importantly;
Does anyone in HR use these boards to look for an employee?
However, I always have found networking with my peers provides much more desireable results. I have a bad taste in my mouth from dealing with the job sites because you usually have to go through headhunting firms to even find out the details.
yourjobisnowinindia.com
I've sought two jobs since these resume sites appeared, and both times I did in fact end up with a job. So in that sense they worked.. though I must admit it's been a bit over two years since my last foray.
However, the site itself didn't put me in contact with employers. I never had a single employer contact me. Who DID contact me was headhunters, and lots of them.
In the end a job is a job, doesn't matter how you get it but the sentiment that jobfinder sites are ineffective at doing what they advertise doesn't seem inaccurate. You could achieve the same results by seeking out local headhunting agencies and applying by more traditional methods.
Most of the jobs I've found on those are either posted by headhunters/recruiters or are jobs that you wouldn't want anyway.
A local job site has some crappy listings too, but they kick Monster.com's ass. They're recent, relevant and have more information.
On the other hand, the best jobs I've found/interviewed for were not posted on those sites. If you want the job, you're looking for them - not the other way around.
Many positions aren't posted to HR until they have someone ready to hire anyway. A few companies I recently dealt with were in the interview stages. Their HR depts were unaware that there was a job opening. That's because the manager didn't want to post an opening and then spend six months trying to fill it. It makes him look picky/incompetent or that people don't want to work for him. He found his guy and sent the resume, position description/job req. and employment contract to HR in one paperclip.
It was a great job, too.
Since I've started looking a few months ago, every job lead I've gotten (over 20) have not been posted on any external job site. You either have to know people at other companies, or check out their individual web pages.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Clearly, as another posted pointed out "headhunter" writing the article has an axe to grind. After all, if we find jobs on these boards, he's not getting the outrageous fees he once got for placement (about 1/3 of your annual salary!)
Also, there is one key facet missing. Many of us, myself included, see jobs listed on Monster.com and the like. We THEN go to our friends and say "do you have a contact at company X, they have a job posted, and I'm interested." So, with a little luck, your social network works, and you end up finding out a bit more about the company. You also end up putting your resume in through that person, instead of through Monster et al. So, what does this mean? It means that Monster.com did its job in alerting you to the availability of a position. But the "statistics" cited by Mr. Headhunter would show that you got your job through a personal referral.
Bad statistics lead to bad results.
Thalia
"send me up an intern!"
signed, Bill Clinton
I was looking for a job last Spring, and I put a lot of effort into building a Monster profile. Didn't help me a bit, and I found a job by other means.
I left my profile active, because hey, what was it doing? Nothing. Then about a month after I started my new job the notifications of job matches started pouring in. Now I get a half dozen matches to my criteria each week. Of course, I don't investigate them so I don't know how useful they really are.
Apparently, it's the best out there. =D
I've used them each time I've been job hunting.
I've found jobs through friends, job fairs, having a client hire me, etc. but never one of these boards. I have had interviews though so theoretically I could have gotten a job if I hadn't taken another from a different source.
That's my personal experience for what it's worth.
That's what I've seen form the various job posting sites such as monster or dice. You post and within a day or two the person calling is a recruiter who wants to be your middleman (middlewoman?) between you and your dream job.
:)
The only other replies I typically got were from my boss saying "What?! Well how bout if we give you $xxx more and another week of vacation"--so I guess those sites have been good to me in a way
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Those sites were great back a few years ago, but now they create so much paperwork for HR departmens (500 resumes for one job), that it makes it basically impossible to find a job. It's not their fault. There's just less jobs out there. I tried to use those sites when I graduated with a Computer Science degree last May and I never heard a peep for months. Then I had to take a job in another field. It's not their fault that there are no Tech jobs or that business executives think that offshoring is a magic pill that will cut their company's costs without losing "quality"
I had used it briefly in the past and never had any success. I left it active during employment periods with no hits. After the department where I was a network security analyst for was dissolved in 2002, I re-wrote my resume, and reposted on Monster, and within two weeks I had a few bites, best of which was by a contractor for a large financial institution, in which I was hired on full time as an IT manager for their training department. The moral of the story is it can be a useful tool if used correctly and if your resume is done correctly. Id recommend using a professional resume writer and basing your online postings off that.
someone found me on monster, and the job i have now with a large tech firm found me on dice.com. i can't complain. relying on little is better than having nothing.
Slashdot, of course!
24 year old sysadmin looking for employment in the OKC area. 4 years experience + Microsoft certification. Reply to thread with offer if interested.
(yes, i'm being a smartass)
I found my current engineering job using Monster, so I'm biased. Be agressive though; I'm probably an exception. I got about 1 interview per 20 jobs I applied for.
One thing I noticed...when you upload your resume, the employers view them sorted by date. I noticed right after I would update it, I would get lots of hits. So I started adding/deleting a period or space every couple days and then saving it, so my resume would always be "current" and near the top of the list. It really increases your clicks.
The IT job market is a very different place than it was two years ago. Remember, correlation != causation.
Having said that, I have had decent luck with Monster in the last five years: I landed one job. Others came through postings on Usenet ('96-'98 - probably not helpful now), Dice.com, and - of course - from people I knew.
Try Dice.com for some contract work to hold you over until you can find something full-time.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Laid off one year ago.
Took about 2.5 mo.s to "find myself"
Started looking, registered with Monster.
Received 2 really good leads and I'm still working at the one I preferred. Both leads came the week I registered.
Continue to receive leads from Monster.
now the catch...
The lead I accepted was from a HeadHunter who found me on Monster. I would have likely never found the job (even though it's only a 55 minute commute away) otherwise.
With that said, I'd recommend Monster but understand that HHs are a reality even with Monster. and yes, HHs do leave you with that "used" feeling. I recommend showering twice after talking to them on the phone and NEVER meet with them in person....
I was in a position a couple years ago to hire somebody. I decided to do it the 'tech' way since it was a tech job and post the job on Monster and Dice. I would never, ever do that again. My job for three weeks was to sort through the over 100 resumes I got a day. Most of which were laughably unsuited. I kept a few of the emails I thought were really funny around for years.
Like the ones that were in all caps. If you're applying for a computer job, I think some mastery of the caps lock key might be a demosntrable asset. But those were the entertaining ones. Most of it was just depressing.
Since then whenever anybody I work with has to hire somebody, I recommend checking the posted resumes, talking to agencies, asking friends, posting on craigslist, but not posting on the commercial boards. It just hurts.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
I got almost no SPAM at one time. Then I posted a resume on several job sites. Being somewhat naive at the time, I used my own email address in the resume.
Since then my SPAM count has gone up to over 100 per day, and my domain gets over 2,000 per day. And rising!
Oh yes, I did not even get a nibble from ANY employer from the job sites. The job I do have came from pounding the streets and networking.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
When I was looking I got on average about 10 calls a week from monster.com and careerbuilder. I can't even count how many calls I got from dice.com , that was by far the best results. But I have always had great luck with them.
I guess to be fair I'll list my filed since mailage may vary.
I am 26, 11 yrs IT (yes I started coding at 15), have a secret clearence and do infosec and PKI (networking and coding).
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
I placed my resume on Monster.com a long time ago and got a relatively large number of companies e-mailing and calling me for interviews and such. My wife also did the same, and got nearly the same results.
Skipping to recently--I don't have a resume available anymore because I was getting too many screwy/shady/questionable "companies" calling and nearly harassing me. My wife was laid-off and she posted her resume, only to get these same people hounding her. Most of them were pyramid-scheme type compaines, or they wanted her to call everyone in the area to see if they could lower their interest rate on their mortgage if they refinanced. Urgh--what a mess. They still call.
I'm really not sure that good companies wouldn't use the online resume sites as a hiring tool. A lot of the problem could just be the economy and how many companies just aren't hiring yet. Once everything starts picking up (hopefully in a few months), I wouldn't be surprised to see my favorite companies even posting jobs to those sites. It's just hard to know where a good place to offer yourself up for employment is when many companies still have hiring freezes in effect. I guess that's where personal contacts become the most valuable asset.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I started my job hunt last June. I had resume's out on all the boards, Monster, HotJobs, ComputerJobs, CareerBuilder, Dice. After the first month, they were refered to as "the black sucking black holes of gloom". My resume's would go out only to be answered by silence and the occasional, and probably imagined, giggle.
But, over the 9 months, I tended to like Dice more than the others. It offered a wider selection.
I did talk to an HR person who posted a job to a site and they put it focus for me. For ever job posted, they get over 3000 applicants. There are so many "programmers" that the job board system is almost useless.
But, I did finally land a job thru ComputerJobs.com, although they had my Monster resume. Go figure.
I got a job working for a dot com consulting co. in houston in '99, I was laid off in '02 and out of work for 9 months, but I got my current gig because someone saw my resume on Monster, again. I've been here 17 months now. So I owe my last 2 jobs to monster........... I've also recieved about 2 dozen emails concerning job oppurtunities since I took the job here, all of them saw my resume on monster. So I've had good luck with monster.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
...though I have to admit that my views on them are colored by the usage on the one we set up at work.
I suspect that there's just too much dilution in the marketplace for any one of them to be really worthwhile -- after all, how many job-boards are there? Even if an HR person sticks only to the "big name" boards, they've only got so much time to post jobs, and if the methods/formats are significantly different from one board to the next, it's just going to take more time and effort, with little or no significant increase in prospects (that's coming from an HR person who gave us feedback on the aforementioned job-board)...
I think it boils down to a lack of standardization from one board to the next, and (as far as I was able to determine during the R&D phase for the site), no consistant way to provide something like a standard upload-a-job function (i.e., allowing someone to have a single Excel file with several jobs, and be able to upload that info to the site).
Now that I'm finished rambling...
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
How about the Navy jobs flooding all areas of interests?
I quit using hotjobs and monster when emails that matched narrow and even broad criteria solely contained Navy endorsements.
How about simply getting off the butt and putting copius amounts of elbow grease into the search? That's the only way I've ever known it to work.
My main experience has been that the local Metro paper here has a website for the whole paper, except instead of publishing the actual want ads online as printed in the paper, they've somehow bought into the 'Careerbuilder' bullshit so you are dragged to a not-local junksite instead of being able to view the ads published in the daily paper.
It's not adequate, and it seems that the 'Careerbuilder' sorts have done a sales job. I suppose my complaints should be directed at the local paper, though.
Really stupid idea. Publish the fricking help wanted ads from your print edition online, newspapers.
---
Most of these boards are nothing more than a haven for recruiters who want to get you for a little as possible.
Instead of removing the middleman as Monster is supposed to do, Recruiters are allowed to join for a fee and post the jobs that they are looking for people for. So instead of getting into direct contact with the hiring director, you usually end up talking to some no-nothing recruiter who doesn't know jack about IT and think he or she is your only conduit to getting a decent position.
A wonderful experience, bah!
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Within hours of posting my resume to Monster in Spring of 2001, I was deluged with inquiries from headhunters. While my direct inquiries to employers posting positions on Monster were fruitless, a headhunter got me an interview at a Fortune 500 very quickly (days). The catch? I wanted a dev position but the job market was glutted with programmers more experienced than me. This guy got me a well-paying job as a Sr. Number Cruncher and helped me build a strategy to transition to IT once I'd proved myself. Number crunching and stats were easy (if not mind-numbing) but I was able to get a good dev spot in under a year once I'd been able to flash my 1337 codking skillz. I've been happily programming here for two years now.
apple nipple hungry
My father-in-law was fired from his job (non IT) after less than a year. He uneasily decided to retire. A week and a half later he got an offer from someone who had seen his old post on Monster. He changed his mind and now has access to the company's private jet.
Imagine that. I'm not in IT (customer service actually, until my wife finishes school and I can go back), but allow me to give my POV as I am out-of-work right now. Now, I'm only looking in the midwest, Iowa in particular, but I would guess that the findings are similar in other locations.
I've found Monster and Career Builder to be the best ones. But even those are a lot like wading through your hotmail account after not accessing it for a week...half "spam". Way too many of the same "Be your own boss! Make $100,000 a year!" jobs for selling life insurance, or licking envelopes, or selling something. A lot of the jobs that appear interesting seem to have trumped-up requirements, at least to me. For instance, I saw an entry-level financial job with a large company that has fallen from grace that touted 28-30k a year, but requires a bachelor's and two years experience!
I don't know, maybe I'm just out-of-touch, as I have never had to "look" for a job anywhere since my first job in 1998...every other place I have known someone, applied, and gotten it. I imagine my search results would be better if I was looking for a specific job at any location, rather than any job at a specific location, but relocation outside of Iowa is not an option right now. I did notice seemingly a lot of jobs in the area for Unix admins/programmers with a lot of experience, a lot of high-level heavy equipment jobs. One claimed I could make $50,000 a year detailing cars!
Anyway, that's what I've seen in the two weeks I've been searching for a job, take it for what it's worth.
Chris
my problem with these sites is the same with almost any non moderated online board: the signal to noise ratio is low. Many of the listings are either duplicates of the same job from multiple recruiters, or recruiters trying to generate interest without actual positions to fill. Not much from potential employers.
Slightly off topic, but I always get annoyed when recruiters looking for Unix or Linux experiace insist on a word doc resume, instead of text or html. You would think that they would know a little bit about the technology they are recruiting for.
I found, when looking for work last summer, that the local job sites (in Philly the best ones seemed to be JobCircle.com and PhillyJobs.com) where the best in at least getting interviews. No matter where you look though, all of those sites seem to be lurking with headhunters. Just my $.02
This Space for Rent.
When I was looking for a job last spring in the New York and/or Boston areas, I decided to take the direct route and mail my resume to companies/organizations that I would want to work for. I was looking in biomedical engineering, research, and medical fields. So I mailed out 500 resumes. It took me a few weeks to print the letters, labels, and fold/seal/stamp them all, but you know what happened?
NOTHING! 500 resumes sent out, with research experience in college, experience in the medical field, adept at programming. I got around 50-70 "Thank you for sending us your resume...." letters. I got one interview, and it wasn't even for a programming job.
My experience is that if you dont have a lot of experience, like me at the time, one year out of college, you'll have a hard time finding a job no matter where you look. Especially if the economy is bad. Since I couldn't find anything in the NY area, I had to convince my fiance to not accept an job at the NYU medical center, just so i could stay in my current insurance job.
Of course AFTER i decide to stay, I've had requests for interviews. It's kind of painful to tell them "No.. I'm sorry, I can't interview for a biomedical research position working in my field of interest at Columbia University. Yeah, even if tuition for graduate school is included. And yes, even for that salary"
Keeping my wife happy is job enough, and definitely worth it. I now know to be patient until the economy is better. There's always a better chance of finding a job when there are more of them.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Online job boards went steadily downhill from 2000.
For each _real_ client position, there were probably 10 recruiting firms pushing the same job listing, some with different wording, some with identical text.
Then in 2001 when the shit hit the fan in IT world, other interesting things started to happen. Client positions would be listed and relisted as if they were new, but in fact they were positions that had been vacant for a year. The client had created the position, but due to market or other reasons had just avoided filling it.
To make matters worse, the bubble burst destroyed consulting firms. Firms with 30+ people suddenly became 2-3 person operations. They started getting hundreds of resumes, and in my view they began to thrash. One headhunter couldn't handle that volume. In any event, there just weren't many jobs anyway.
Fast forward to now. The job boards are full of MLM bs. I glanced at monster a couple of days ago and was shocked to see what it had become. 3 of 5 listings supposedly related to the "java" keyword were for bogus "work from home" jobs.
So basically, it's all a crock. The one thing that has, and will always work, is human networking. Get to know people, lots of them. Then you'll have people to contact when you need a job. They may not have a job for you, but one of them may know someone who does.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Several years ago, I was lucky to land a good-paying job on dice.com. At the same time, I was receiving nothing but script-errors from monster.com. I deleted my monster profile. Six months later, I started receiving email updates about jobs that matched my search-agents from monster.com. They never deleted my profile.
To this day, I've never received a response from a resume submitted through monster.com. I've had better luck with jobsummit.com (only in SoCal area) getting interviews and responses. The best results have been from local newspaper web-listings (signonsandiego.com) and craiglist.com (I wish I'd discovered it much sooner). In fact I have an interview in a couple of hours with a company I found listed on craigslist.com.
It's all Hood
I've had an experience where a "recruiter" called and said "I was perfect" for the job and I was pretty much "hired". All he needed were 3 management references. So, I gave them to him. After calling and emailing him for a couple of weeks to see what's up and never hearing from him, I gave up. I found out later that he called all my references to see if they needed his company's services! He was using me for sales contacts!!
I do not use job web sites anymore.
There is no spoon or sig.
but the jobs were mostly posted by headhunting firms. The one I ended up with was thru Dice to a Headhunter, and from there to where I work now.
In fact, in 2000, Dice was almost all headhunters looking to fill jobs for the real employers.
And I never post a resume up there. Lord help you if your current employer finds one up there like that.
Most of my other jobs predate things like Monster and the like, so I have no real comparision.
As for today, every once in a while I look, but I am happy here. I also get a phone call every once in a while from old headhunters that have dug up my resume in their files. I keep telling them that I won't go back to Teradata, but they keep asking.
Except for the one guy who called about a position which turned out to be the place I had just left before here. I asked if the same boss was there, and when he said yes, I told him that I wouldn't consider it until they finally got around to firing him.
While indeed sites like monster and dice have been no help at all, having a resume online and making sure it can be found through search engines worked out well for me.
What I did was this: Put a version of my resume online. Not on one of the job-sites, but on my own website. Make it available in several formats: Word, HTML, plain text and maybe PDF. Then I submitted the url to a number of search-engines, including Google and the Open Directory Project.
What I found is that sites specializing in tech-resumes often copy the content of the ODP resume section. Many hits for my resume come from such sites.
The rest come from keyword search-engines, so it's a good idea to put the right keywords in your resume: Try to think of which terms a recruiter (NOT the tech-manager) would search for when looking for a candidate in your field. Remember, this is a non-technical person, so "buzz-words" (annoying as they are) tend to work best.
The result is that even 7 months after I found a job, my resume gets 50-60 hits a month and every once in a while I get an email from a serious recruiter.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
I don't know what my success really means, but I found my current job over CareerBuilder. I've been here over a year, and it's pretty much the best job I've ever had. However, I really could have just as easily found it in the classifieds. It's just that I ran into their ad first at CareerBuilder.
In some cities (such as San Francisco), the newspapers don't even advertise 'real' IT jobs anymore... so you don't even have any choice.
But I've personally never had any active luck with job boards, although I was headhunted through the boards by an Agengy to get my current job...
My old .com used one of those once. Posted a job on the board and even got the position printed on a local billboard (co-branded with the online job board).
Posting anonymously because I still have business contacts from that (now defunct) company.
Perhaps things have changed? Those were strange times.
I would say that job boards make it even easier for headhunters to find people.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I used to get calls from postings on Monster and Dice all the time--five years ago. Like another poster, once I would refresh my profile, I'd get calls almost immediately (not within 20 minutes, but less than 24 hours). It was like that for several years. VERY good responses from real companies. I got headhunted from an online profile to a very good contract position that went to permanent. I still get responses from desperate headhunters around the country, but the jobs are no where near as well matched and they only come every few weeks or months.
It is much better these days to go to local listings. The work I have now I got from internal job boards and local newspaper classifieds. The simple fact is that a company posting to Dice or Monster will get a stack of 1000 resumes even for the most obscure requirements. If they post to a local newspaper or an internal board, they'll get ten. No one wants to skim though thousands of resumes, so a great number of positions will never even show up on the big boards. There simply are too many people with 20 years experience and five degrees competing for jobs paying half of what they're worth. Get local, find a company that sounds interesting and is hiring, or has recently been hiring, and do it the old fashioned way: schmooze. Besides, it's less soul destroying than apathetically clicking through Dice.
Another caution: Do NOT pay for the services of the big boards. They're just predators looking for prey. Great, they'll submit your resume--with 999 others, and charge you fifty bucks. Take your money and spend it on good stationery, dry-cleaning and your telephone bill.
If you're using Firebird/Firefox try going to the URL http://http://www.linux.org or any other URL with a doubld http:// in front.
Many cites have local job boards. I found more real job offers and less "GET RICH NOW! BE YOUR OWN BOSS!" crap on the one for my city.
If you are not interested in relocating, this can help. As always though, networking thru friends/relations is best.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If it wasn't for job boards, I most likely wouldn't have had anything like the good time I had on my year out between school and university. I found my first job as a temp through reed.co.uk, the online outpost of an established job agency. That job, though only 7/hour, allowed me to expand my skills and add to my portfolio. I ended up staying in that job for three months. Ironically my job was to develop a job board application. But the difference to the big ones was that this board was much more local to the area. Using skills and confidence I had aquired, I was then able to scout for work more effectively, landing myself a 3-month contract. I love job boards.
I agree with the comments about signal to noise ratio on these boards. It is hard sometimes to find what you want over all that noise; but if you have useful skills and a well-written resume, I think the boards are a good way to fish as see what comes to you.
I used these sites (monster and dice) in 2001 when I was thinking about leaving Razorfish as business development suddenly got difficult and we were shedding people by the hundreds. At this time I wanted to get out, but I was not in a rush, so I put my resume out there and searched on a fairly regular basis.
The searches were not terribly effective (signal to noise), but eventually some head hunters picked up on me and found a very good match based on my skill set. (The market was flooded with out of work Java programmers and perl jockeys; I was looking for some place to do plain old C programming).
Both the head hunter and my eventual employer remarked that my resume stood out because it was well-written and it looked like I wrote it myself rather than having been manhandled by a desperate head hunter.
Having also been on the hiring side for scores of hiring decisions throughout my career, I cannot over emphasize the importance of quality organization, writing, and formatting in your resume.
The main problem with these sites are not the sites themselves, but the users of them. Online job hunting has made it as easy as the touch of a button to apply. This has made people a lot more willing to apply for that CEO position even though they're currently working Fries at the local McDonald's.
A lot of my friends that work in HR say that the deluge of people is just overwhelming, and people rarely take a good look at the qualifications. Most companies are required to keep your resume on file for a certain period of time after you apply, as well. This means the ideal job they should be posting is data entry for the resumes that are pouring in, and will likely only be glanced at before filing. The HR staff just can't keep up, and need some sort of filter, so they will always look at more traditional ways first, such as referrals from the inside, or even those who take the time and effort to Fax or Mail a resume with a good cover letter.
For the record, I have used many of these sites, and even gotten a handful of interviews from them, but the last one was almost 3 years ago.
I know through "insiders" at a few companies that I applied to that they often posted jobs that they didn't have openings for. Apparently, they thought it made the companies look better to stockholders.
I've seen way too many bad jobs (meaning investment required, fee involved, or asking for $100K/yr skillset at only $24K/yr and it's in the middle of nowhere) posted on those things.
Monster is now just a shill for its advertisers.
I don't trust them, HotJobs or anyone else for that matter.
While I would not rely on them as our sole method of job hunting, sites such as Monster are faily easy to use so there is no reason not to put up a resume. Plus you can usually set up a 'search agent' to email you relevant job posts. Sure, you do get some spam- I got a lot of WORK FROM HOME!!! emails, but no one said job hunting is easy or spam free. The other thing I noticed is that headhunter/recruiters browse resumes. I was contacted by two differnt headhunters who after talking to me on the phone, forwared my resume directly to the hiring manager. This worked for me and I was able to bypass silly initial interviews with someone in HR who has no clue about the position.
And thats about the only time. Every Professional job that I have ever landed has been due to personal contact working at the company that I was going to. However back in 2002 I found myself laid off and almost every professional contact that I had was also laid off or working for a company with a hiring freeze. At this point, Monster and those like it was my only resource (recruiters were worthless). I found a job at Monster at a local company. Sent my resume in with the others. Then went one step further, called up ex-coworkers and found that I knew someone there. Talked to that person and that got me the job. But I never would have know about the job if it had not been for Monster.
I've gotten my last two jobs thru companies searching on monster.com and calling me directly.
Both are here in metro Atlanta and both are companies you have heard of.
The first was in June 2001 and the second was in May 2002 (the first one was WebMD, and I didnt want to be downsized, the second one is a large, stable telco)
The article makes a big point of how Monster etc. don't keep statistics of how many people get hired through them, but there's no mention of the fact that most job listings on those sites include a sentence, "send resume to jobs@company.com", and usally there's a mailto link just for that. I don't think anyone applies for a job through the Monster application (I don't even know what it looks like, although I have submitted my resume for many jobs I found on Monster). The article doesn't specify exactly what the statistics for the different job board hiring rates mean. Are those numbers based on jobs that went to people who actually used Monster's application process? That those figures are thrown out there without more qualification makes it hard to know what to make of the whole article. All I got from it (which I already suspected) is that 40% of jobs are found through word-of-mouth. That doesn't really tell me anything about how effective or ineffective job boards are.
Probably the main problem, with tech jobs more than others, is saturation of fields. There is also the "economy" and bs like that..
I was job hunting for a few months and most interviews I was getting were coming from Craigslist (I am in New York area).
To my surprise, however, eventually I got a job that I applied for a few months earlier through Monster.
When you're collecting unemployment, and required to 'make at least two job contacts per week', I know I did. Of course, I didn't get any useful leads from them.
I'd maybe get an e-mail, whatever, and hear nothing further, but not to the point of actually getting an interview.
I did better with sites that weren't quite so broad -- washingtonjobs.com [the area I'm in], and checking postings specific to my field [SAGE, *.pm].
In the end, what got me a job was having one of my former co-workers who saw a job posting on a mailing list she was on, passed it off to me, I applied [to hit my 2 per week quota], and got called for an interview like 2+ months later. But they liked me, and offered me a job, and it didn't completely disagree with my morals, so I took it.
[besides, if I declined a job, I was then inelligible for unemployment by my understanding of the DC rules]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Craig's List is where we post our our jobs. The response is amazing. Many of our clients also post with great results. It's a great way to pick up gigs if they have it in your city.
Eric
geektek.com - hosting, dedicated servers and co-lo
Later I updated my information, and again, within a week people were calling me up asking me to work for them.
Of course, this is just my experience. My resume is pretty decent, and I'm not trying to price myself too high. So what's the real problem? People expecting what I got at the edge of the dot-com bubble. I gaurantee that if you price yourself in the same league as a third-world worker you'd be job offers up the ying-yang.
><));>
I got my current job via monster. For that matter I got all my interviews leading to my first job via Monster. I don't think I had any success via any other source come to think of it. So, I guess it worked well for me.
I've used Monster twice.... once in 2001 and once a month ago. Both times, headhunters and companies alike began contacting almost instantaneously. The last time was amazing, I had heard stories of cut backs at my current job, and decided to search. After posting, I had a new job within 15 miles of where I lived in under a month's time.
Of course it was one of those "Go to our other site and reenter all your info there" things. But I got to apply for a half dozen jobs and got an interview email within a day. Oh and this was last June (2003) so it was post-boom.
Strangest thing: At my interview I found out that a guy I went to grad school (I just graduatated) was here (they had me eat lunch with him). On top of that a guy who I knew from High School and I hadn't seen in 6 years just moved into the department in the building next to mine. It started to cross that threshold into creepy.
But, yes, I did get hits off of Monster. Of course the best were usually those that required you to (as above) to fill in information again on their site. It seems to keep the resume-flooders away. But I didn't even know my current employer existed until I went browsing.
What is music when you despise all sound?
So the dope who modded the parent down is saying HR departments aren't staffed with stupid self serving bitches? You know, you arn't doing anybody any good promoting the myth that you can rely on HR.
For some reason they think I'm a recruiter. I've never even contacted those assholes and they've been spamming me now for nearly 2 years.
For the most part, I'd have to agree with that assesment. (Not totally, there is some use, but mostly overrated.)
In the past, I've used Monster.com and ComputerJobs.com. And all of my calls have been from consulting companies. Which is really strange, since I always specify that I'm not interested in being a consultant.
Ultimately, you need to consider who these types of sites are for. Let's face it most of the really sweet companies don't use them. That's because they have ppl banging down their doors. They don't need Monster.
I can think of a lot of people I know who have their resumes and only one who has gotten a cool job.
Stamps are Cheap. This was true in the paper / postal service days of job hunting too. It's part of the cost of doing business.
.com boom, when the supply and demand suddenly reversed. Thus, the number of applicants per posting has jumped hugely. If you're looking for a specific skill set you have to cast a wide net and then be selective. If you're more concerned about a good employee, but have broader experience requirements, get a referral. Existing employees are still an employers best filter - nobody wants to work with a jerk.
These recruiting sites arose at the end of the
Try here:
http://www.monsterindia.com/
When the market is hot, these sites can be jumping becuase it was harder for companies to find candidates. Now with a slower job market, a company is more likely to have candidates at their door and they do not need to resort to online services. If I were hiring right now, I would look for folks who were actively coming to me. Shows a bit more ambition, IMHO. I know too many folks who have posted resumes on these sites and said that was how they were hunting for jobs. Then they sit around and bemoan that they don't have jobs while playing video games all day long.
When the job market is slow, a job board like that is not the best place to be hunting. Phone, mail and sneaker net beats them right now.
He's another jerk that spams recruiter.
I looked and found a job that I could do so I sent my resume to the people responsible for hiring people and well I got an email saying that I'm everything they're looking for being an employee, but I could never get in contact with them again. I've called them from six to eight times with in three weeks at normal business hours, and left quite a few messages, and even emailed them twice, but they never called back nor emailed me back. So basically I said fuck them and tried looking for other jobs, and nada. Everything these days it's about the whole .NET garbage which I won't even waste my time with.
This space is not for rent.
For real results, you have only to look at Monster India.
Many jobs I am finding. Yes, good jobs, imported jobs, yes indeed.
Would you like a side of Tech Support with that software?
maybe it doesn't work becuase your resume looks like this.
After our web company mostly dried up, my wife and I both started looking for jobs. We posted on Monster, Hotjobs, CareerBuilder, and more, and though we customized our resume and applied to maybe 60 jobs each, we never got a single non-automated response. Not even a "Hey, got your resume. Sorry, but the position has been filled."
The only useful thing that came of it is recruiters who saw the resumes posted there and started looking for jobs for us. That got me some interviews, but no jobs.
I finally got a job through a friend of mine.
Next time I need to find a job, I'm going to post a resume on the boards, but I wont use them to go after any jobs. Recruiters work much better and friends, the best.
It's fairly well-known that personal networking is more effective than job boards and newspaper ads. That doesn't mean that job boards are useless -- in fact, I just got an interview off Monster. It does mean, however, the time you spend job hunting on Monster et. al. versus talking to people should be proportionate to your likelihood of success.
Most people I know who are looking for a job spend 90% of their job-hunting time looking online, even though the likelihood of finding a job that way is something like 2%. (Don't have exact stats handy.)
As for headhunters, your success partly depends on what kind of headhunter you have. If they are on retainer with the company (rare), then they get paid regardless of whether or not they find a specific candidate, so chances are they will spend more time recruiting good ones -- otherwise, a bad placement could cost them their retainer.
If they are contracted by the company to find a specific role (more common), than they don't get paid unless they get someone hired, so they're more likely to blanket-bomb the employer with resumes. Worse yet are those headhunters who were not solicited by the company, but are attempting to sell their services to the company anyway. Most companies try to avoid these guys, so you're not at all likely to find something that way.
But in any case, the headhunter does not work for you; your best interests are not their top priority.
I can spell. I just can't type.
We've had much better luck posting ads on the bulletin boards of local user groups and professional associations.
Submit your resume to any of those and watch tons of junk mail show up in your mail box. The worst part is that it was mostly re-finance, meake money fast and "easy-loans" junk! I seriously believe there are companies posting fake jobs just to farm info out of the resumes. (ie. Predators looking for unemployed people in need of money)
I've used monster, dice, and a few others to help me search for jobs for quite some time. (read: years) It's kinda nice to see what else is out there, but it has never actually gotten me a job. Regardless of that the job boards say, your best bet is to people network to find available positions. (friends of friends of friends as it were.) By all means use what is available to you, but don't rely on it.
The Man in Black
None of these websites worked for me. I am a very well qualified Phd in computer science and was able to find better opportunities through contacts than through any of these websites.
Damn, Ted, if you're going to try to say something that sounds "Insightful", at least read the article that you're criticizing. It'll save you the trouble of revealing that you're a blithering idiot.
i started looking for work through the la times online, monster, dice, hot jobs, smaller area based head hunter sites and what not around the end of 02 beginning of 03. my girlfriend at the time would search the posting on the jobtrak site at ucla (or let me use her id too) as well. i dont know the exact number of responses i got from "internet job boards" (ie. monster and the like), but i can tell you i definitely got less than 5 responses. the la times and local newspaper sites seemed to have the best return. i got a probably 16 interviews through newspaper ads. i got such a better response from then i started checking monster once weekly and only taking the most promising listings instead of everything i was qualified for. i found a lot local papers i didnt know existed, and i generally got some response from the ads i found in them.
i also realized that networking, while great, didnt help at all. i have friends in every level of seemingly every industry and not one could help me find any employment. then i happened upon craigslist.org. for the la area, it works great for so many things. i found the most sincere listings, the most interesting jobs, the best responses. i probably got 8 or 9 interviews from craigslist.
i realized that most everything posted on monster and some of the newspaper ads were coming from an employment agency, so i started applying to them. even to the same company is different cities that i would be willing to commute to. in the end, i got one response from the 11 employment agencies i joined. irony is, after i found employment, they suddenly had some meaningless one day receptionist position theyd want me to fill. pretty retarded.
basically, i feel that monster and the like are just ways for employment agencies to post listing to get responses and resumes. they get paid for signing people up as well as fidning them jobs and it shows. i find monster and them all to be useless. newspapers, while cumbersome seem to work the best. oh, another funny thing, the first job i landed, from a newspaper response, they wouldnt hire me until i passed a probationary period, so they said i had to get paid through a temp agency. haha, i went into the local one that i applied with first, and they got to keep 1/3 of my hourly pay. is that great or what. i joined them, they didnt do shit, i found a job, they got 1/3 of my money. gotta love their scam. i got fired a few days before my probationw as over and the next job i got was trhough craigslist i believe. im not certain, but it was either craigslist or a newspaper.
i think newspapers and craigslist are the best options, the other online boards are just temp agencies farming resumes.
Are the recruiting firms friend. Job postings have been flooded by recruiting firms, often times for the same job.
I hate recruiters, unless they work for the company themselves. They are not your friend or ally. I could go on about my fuming working both sides of the ball with them, hiring from a recruiting firm and trying to get placed as well.
All the job posting boards should make it a policy that they can only work with end users, Employers and Employees. That way they could still be effective and improve the quality of the postings on both sides of the ball.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
I hire all of the technical talent at my company. We are a small systems integration and consulting firm doing about 6 million a year in revenue.
Here is my bottom line response to Monster. It looks great, but is priced WAY out of my range. I can't afford the thousands of dollars they want for posting my open positions. Even there economy option is to restrictive. One job post, 60 days, no changes to the verbage, under one position heading...$500. So Monster simply isn't an option for us.
Sure, if I am ebay or some other mega-sized corporation hiring tens or hundreds of people, then one of those boards may be an option, but my guess is that most small business under 100 people find that it is priced out of their range.
Where do I post now? Craiglist
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
CV
I'm currently looking for employment in or around Edinburgh, UK as a software developer, preferably in C/C++.
Hey... it was worth a try...
Freeagent and guru used to get me calls. Now Nettemps.com brings some occasional contacts and things. I would say the apply-to-phonecall ratio is from 30-to-1 to 100-to-1, meaning you eventually talk to someone after making 30-100 applications.. as for getting a job from them, I'd say 500 to a 1000 applications to 1 job.
meh
When I decided to look for a new job roughly two years back, I went the route of Monster and Dice for a few months.
After not even getting as much as a 'Thank You for your application' email, I decided that it was time to look in other locations.
I finally went another route and decided to Fax, Mail or walk in my resume to companies hiring in my area. This way my resume was a physical copy someone had to hold, file or keep out on their desk.
Too easily (even now as we're hiring an ASP/VB developer in the San Diego area *shameless plug*) emailed or electronically submitted resumes sit in an Inbox or email account. Some are never printed or even read for final consideration.
So I guess if I had to give a suggestion to people on how to go about getting a new job these days, it would be to avoid electronic resume submission, and make sure you always provide a physical copy of your resume either by mail or fax.
I would recommend paying a visit to Jobsearch.org (similar to Dice, Monster, ...). Last time I checked, I found more jobs that matched my search criteras than I found on Monster. It seems to be run by some governement agency; I think employers can post freely. One of the nice things with that site is it allows you to bookmark some job postings for future reference (which is nice to have, even if it's not unique to that site).
I seem to get a flood of emails inviting me to apply for an exciting entry-level position in pharmaceutical sales.
My resume was found through Monster (not for a job I applied for, just the resume hanging out there).
I was given an offer to interview, flown out for the interview, interviewed, and given an offer, all within about a month.
This was in April of 2003. I had just graduated from university.
The company is Fortune 100. Possibly 50, I forget. I like my job, too.
So, yes, it does seem to work, at least for me.
(No, we're not hiring right now. Sorry.)
My experience doing a lot of job searching was that some of the boards work and some (i.e. monster) are crap. I did get one job through dice.com. However, craigslist.org is still the best.
It may not be the best way to find a job or the shortest method, but I've found 5 jobs by having my resume on a site or searching for jobs on them.
Four of them were for startups and now the most current is for a large computer manufactuer that has been around for a long time.
So if I ever have to go down that road again, I will continue to use the online sites along with the other methods available.
I've gotten (tech) jobs through Dice, through craigslist (in my bygone Bay Area days), and through local newspapers.
The big internet job boards are worth doing, however I would caution anyone using them not to expect too much. You don't get anywhere near the same kind of per-resume or per-application results you will get with other venues, but sometimes they will pay off anyway. If you're desperately seeking work, you'd be a fool not to explore every avenue that even might help you find gainful employment in the field of your choice.
It's not the size of the board, it's how you use it. :)
Seriously, though...How you use a job board plays a prominent role. I've found that applying for jobs, job agents, etc. is rather useless. The employer/headhunter on the other end gets piled with resumes and your chances of getting through are rather slim, even if you combine the Ultimate Cover Letter with the Holy Resume of Zinthar.
Where I have had success is letting the recruiters/employers come to me. I post my resume, including all of my skills, and I allow them to look up the skills they're looking for and contact me if they think I might be a fit. I've tried it all ways, and this is the way I've gotten every IT job I've held to date. It allows the recruiter/employer to dictate the terms of their search.
I don't have the data, but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of available jobs over something like Monster are not posted. Rather, they prefer to search the database of those who've posted their resumes and look for a potential fit that way. The alternative seems to be that they get flooded with a bunch of cover letters and resumes from desperate techies who would say they could code Fortran on punch cards if it got them an interview.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Arthur Andersen?
There are still few enough experienced *Nix geeks running around that I get three to five 'hits' per month from Monster. The market has changed enough that I'm sitting tight where I'm at because (IMO) this position has more 'job security' than the opportunities I encounter (Right now it's illegal for a foreign national to do parts of my job), but the fact remains that they are there.
I live in a place where there is a moderate tech industry, and I've seen 40 "displaced" Unix techies ranging from junior admin to Senior Systems Engineer placed in just six months. I've seen most of those positions show up on Monster (in my email box via the Monster Agent).
In short, it wouldn't surprise me if someone whose resume was all Windows customer support or client support had trouble getting hits from Monster - there are just too many guys chasing the few positions that are open, and lots of them are Engineer level talent.
Thinking outside my Head
While I've had success using the job boards (I still get calls about outdated resumes I left floating around from my job hunting days) to get a job you need to exploit your connections.
:)
I got my current job from someone bringing in my resume. I then submitted resumes for 8 of my acquaintances and 5 of them received job offers.
Keep in touch with former coworkers after you leave. An e-mail every few months just to say hi will do. You never know when you'll need a job or when your company will need an employee.
That being said, any programmers (US citizens only) needing a job near Balitmore just reply to this message with your e-mail address. See, the system works!
In the bay area I would hire off of craigslist before any other big boards. I mean monster was all over the super bowl...
I dont think they use their money wisely - and I would think their focus is more on frivilous expensive advertising like the multi-million dollar super bowl placements - then actually getting the little guy a good job.
In my opinion, the quality order of the big job-boards, from greatest to absolute worst is:
1.) Monster. Tons of ads--most are actually for legit jobs. Only a couple "Help Desk Internship" postings for training companies. Plus, the resume posting has gotten me attention from half-dozen different outfits.
2.) CareerBuilder. Used to be all headhunter crap, but now that they've partnered with 1,000,001 newspapers, you get real ads for real jobs from your local paper. There are occasionally ads for those "Earn $60,000 with 12 months training" places, though.
3.) Dice. Godawful. Almost 100% headhunter/fakeout-fraudster listings. I've never called somebody re: a job on Dice where the conversation didn't end with "Sorry, we've already filled that." And I don't think its because Dice is "so awesome" at getting people work. I think its because their ad-rates are uber-cheap so headhunters use them to collect a good pool of eligible applicants' resumes for when they have actual jobs to fill.
Overall, my online job site experiences have been mixed. Monster has gotten me three interviews, and about half-dozen inquiries in the last year, which is a pretty good "hits to interview" ratio. (Hits to interview ratio is my own made up, totally non-scientific statistic.) CareerBuilder has brought me one interview after inquiring with more than 50 employers, so not a very good ratio. Dice is garbage though. 100% of the time I've spent on Dice.com has been wasted. You'd do better to hire a crop duster to drop your "Resume folded as origami" from an airplane over the city than to spend your time searching Dice for jobs. Their new service where, for $50, they spam your resume to several thousand headhunters also looks rather scammy/worthless.
My advice? Network. Figure out what companies you're interested in, and find out where the employees hang out after work. Go there, meet a few of them, and make friends. Then drop an email a few weeks later mentioning your job-search. I've gotten a handful of interviews using this technique as well.
Who did what now?
Well for starters its pretty damn expensive to post jobs on there. So as a small private company we opted to use the governments "job bank" which was free. We had over 20 replies the first day.
It would seem to me that niche job search/placement sites are a better bet than the huge sites like monster and the others. Those sites are just like sending your resume into a black hole. Smaller job sites that are geared towards a particular job type or career field would seem to be the way to go, because the staff for those sites more than likely have been in the industry before, and know what contacts to make and how best to advertise resumes and open positions. an example: http://www.jobsinltc.com
I can code FORTRAN on punch cards.
during my unemployed in 2001-2 I quickly discovered (and wrote about) the problems with these boards.
Here's the trick I learned. Don't bother applying to any of the jobs on monster! But be sure to put a profile on monster/yahoo with lots of keywords. HR and contractors are not interested in receiving lots of letters and resumes from people who are trying to fit their skills into a job description. More likely, they want to punch in a few keywords and then email 5 or so people who they think have that skill (and other things).
As far as the recommendation about whether to update your monster profile every day, that was true for about a year, and then afterwards the major job boards fixed that way to game the system.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I must have applied for 2-300 jobs on various online boards, I got 2 calls back both from silly start up businesses who wanted me to invest in them so they could invest in me. You know the type!
Got my latest job the same way I've gotten all my jobs, I actually made the effort to visit the business and talk face to face with them.
For what it's worth, I've had (and kept) my resume up on Monster for just over the past 2 years. I go and update it every now and again to reflect new skills, or new projects worked on, and over the past two years, I have had numerous people contact me regarding my resume there. Now, the kicker is that EVERY person who has contacted me has been a recruiter/headhunter, I would say that I was offered interviews perhaps 8 times over the past two years. All of these offers (except for one) came at a time while I was happily employed, so I turned them all down. The one time I went for an interview (only with the recruiter), the interview went fine, but the company he was hiring for ultimately chose someone else [I think I wanted too much money ;) ].
Anyways, all that said, what I really think is that the best way to get a job is through who you know. I can say this by experience.
1) My first job came to me straight out of BCIT (canadian technical college) because me and one other guy organized the career fair for our class and we got to know all of the HR people.
2) My second job came to me through a guy I met while working at my first job, who eventually went to start his own company.
3) My third job came to me through a programmer I know at the church that I go to (friend of a friend).
4) My fourth job came to me through another friend of a friend who I met once at a birthday dinner.
These are the four main full-time jobs I've had as a Java Developer. I've had numerous consulting engagements as well, and all of these were the direct result of someone who knew me, or someone I knew who knew someone else. Go ahead and laugh at my grammar and convoluted statements, but I'm telling you, go meet a bunch of programmers, project managers, IT people, go to seminars, dinners, meetings, user groups, whatever. Talk to everyone. It really pays off.
java guy, tech blog...
Being, among other things, an HR guy, I advertise in exactly one place - the (Canadian) federal government Job Bank. Generates plenty of applications, most of them related to the job. Is there nothing similar in the USA?
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
I could not get a reply to a job thats major requirement was proficiency in an application that I co-wrote. How's that for disappointing?
About half a year ago I was through many of the job sites out there. While there were a few good ones out there, it has seriously become an effort just to sort out the crap from the legitimate posts. While this is true and there are a lot of people abusing the system for "work at home" and recruitment, I did manage to recieve 3 good interviews from that experience and was hired from one of those 3. The worst part about posting resumes though is that you will receive a lot of calls from recruiters. My favorite was a "technical recruiter" who after looking over my resume asked me what the following things were: PHP, APACHE, and Open Source. To his credit, I mentioned Linux and he exclaimed, "That! I know what a Linux is. Can to learn .NET really fast?"
We'll be asking a car salesman if classfied ads are your best bet for buying a car.
Something about a barber and a haircut
...and it's the best job I've ever had. I just hit my 3-year anniversary, the longest I've ever held the same job. Before that, all my work assignments came from Aquent Partners, formerly MacTemps-- the last one of which before my current job ended up in my being hired full time.
I still keep a frequently-updated resume available on Monster, just in case something better comes along-- but right now I'm making great money and my office is 10 minutes from my house, so "something better" would have to be one rung below "getting paid six figures to sit at home, watch TV and play video games all day."
~Philly
About the only thing I've gotten from these places is a false sense of hope, a ton of spam for "resume rabbit" and the like resume-mass-mailers, and a bunch of useless calls from recruiters. I'm not talking to anyone unless they're from the company they represent. I've had better luck so far with personal contacts and leads from friends. I still have my same job of 8yrs, but that's not stopping me from finding something better (I'm certainly not paid for my experience here).
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I used Monster 3 years ago to get my current Sys Admin job.
I posted an extensive resume and applied to about 30 different job postings online over about a month. I never got anything more than a few thank you emails and a couple rejection letters in the mail.
I left it alone for a month and one day had some cryptic message from my now boss saying "My name is blah blah please meet me here at this day and time..." That was it, no company name no other details. Turns out he's just a man of few words.
After he hired me he told me that he had intervied 12 other candidates from various sources but in the end liked me the best because he found my resume, and chose me for the interview. I guess its all about perspective.
For what it's worth he also told me Monster costs A LOT less for employers than your average head hunters fees.
Apple free since 1990!
I used Jobserve in the UK. Although I didn't find a job from it, I did get some interviews.
The process seems a bit different to the US. Jobserve adverts come from recruitment agents. They are specialists who deal with the avalanche of inappropriate resumes in response to each advert and winnow it down to a manageable short list. These people also maintain their own resume databases, so a key part of job hunting is to get your resume on their databases. You do this by applying for jobs.
That said, it was a personal contact who got me my current job. Personal networks will always win in the job hunting game because hiring anyone is a risk, and knowing a prospective employee is the best way to reduce that risk. Thats why the inside candidate always wins, and there is nothing wrong with it.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
The company I work for (Healthcare inustry, 20-60 Billion a year in revenue) uses them for almost every job, however they may not actually get around to interviewing people off of them. They post internally, and we have 7 days to apply from within. Then if the supervisor wants to fill the job with a consultant, they talk to one of the 3-5 consultant firms that we hire from exclusivley. If nobody from within looks good, or they don't want a consultant, then and only then will they start going through the pile of resumes that they get from their job posting(mostly from Monster). Most people in IT get in from friends/relatives, or consultancy to full time conversions, but I do know a few that came in from internet postings.
At least for the Bay Area craigslist.org is where it's at. I got one job through HotJobs in 2001 but basically every other job [contract and permanent] I've gotten from the internet since 1996 is from craigslist.
I think most of those make their money because companies have to publicise postings to fulfill their EOE status.
Prague, Czech Republic. We're in the process of hiring 100 people for an IBM subcontract. If you don't mind moving to europe, where the women are gorgeous, send me a note.
Unicorn
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
in the uk jobsite.co.uk and jobserve.co.uk are probably the only way to get a job in the IT industry I have had all my jobs though these sites. how ever anyone thinking that jobs will seek them should think again. You need to apply for the jobs listed there and get on all the agencys books.. These sites are there to help you find the jobs not spoon feed you the jobs. with the right attitude and knowing signing up for these things is part of the first step (ie. not even the whole first step) to finding a job you will find a job.
In fact I got two job offers on the same day. One from a company I found on Monster and another from a company that found my resume on either monster or hotjobs (can't remember which.) I also had many, many interviews that resulted directly from Monster and Hotjobs.
My company relies on Monster to identify candidates, mainly for sales positions.
Even if the chances are slim, if you are looking for a job - put your resume on monster.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
Semi-topical perhaps, but if you're looking to find out about legit work-at-home jobs--not those envelope-stuffing or pyramid marketing scams--check out wahm.com, the "Work-At-Home Moms" (but the information's good for anyone with a work-at-home interest, Mom or not) website. They've got message boards, informational links, and debunkment of the most common scams. I've been looking for a resource like this for a long time.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Human networking, as others have pointed out, is by far the best way to find a good job -- but only if you know a lot of people.
I have a steady, fairly well paying, job in government I.S. Our newest hardware tech., unknown to any of us for many weeks after the tech was hired, happens to be good friends with a wealthy businessman. This wealthy businessman needed someone to do "a little weekend project" for him. All the other programmers in the I.S. department were either too busy or not qualified to write GUI apps. Management at my job doesn't care as long as it doesn't negatively impact my work.
I agreed, under the assumption that it would be a couple weekends (at the most), and then it would be over. That's not how it worked out, but it worked out for the better. I told the guy that I charge $50/hour (which is very high for my neck of the woods), would only be able to work on it on weekends, and that it was not possible to accurately predict a completion date.
After some debating, he agreed. I'm pulling in my normal full time salary at work, and an extra $1000/weekend. I'm projecting (using the WAG method) completion at about $20,000. And he's absolutely thrilled at the prospect.
Human networking. It turns up good things at the most unexpected times. I wasn't even looking for anything. I just happened to know someone who knew someone.
I got my previous job on dice.com
My current job came from a 'new mexico technology' board
love is just extroverted narcissism
I got my first job, just out of school in '99 from Monster.com in Software Development. Then, in my second job search just recently, I got 3 offers from Monster.com in Network Engineering.
Maybe it is just because I apply to so many damn jobs, but Monster.com seems to work for me. I never had any luck with hotjobs.com or dice.com, though.
Of you and the other people that have gotten jobs via 'headhunters', are these direct jobs or contract positions?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was laid off from my Sys. Admin. job early last May. These online job sites are absolutely brutal for looking for work, you need to think, for every job that is posted on them, they are probably literally thousands of people applying, it's almost inpossible to stand out. They make applying to a positions to easy, anyone with 1/10th the necessary qualifications/experience can apply at a mouseclick. After 7 months of unemployment, I eventually got picked out of one for my online resume, and am now in a position I am much happier with. But I think I picked up a few tips during my ordeal:
i) Since there are so many applicant's out there, most resume's are likely OCR'ed before a pair of real human eyes ever gazes upon them, they're looking for acronyms, so styff it with everything you know (PHP, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Apache, etc.).
ii) Brute force is the way to go, you really need to fire tons of them out to increase your chances, so apply to anything that even looks remotely interesting, everyone else does, you will drown in numbers if you don't.
iii) Don't let online job boards be your only method of searching, networking is still way better, by that I mean contacts you've made in past positions and meeting with recruiters. Recruiters may seem like a waste of time, but I do think the one that set me up here was definately worth my time, they spent time getting to know me, and are valuable contacts now should I or someone I know be looking for a new position.
I found a job once off of usenet around 1996. Since then I have used Monster and Hotjobs. The last three jobs I've had have been off of these boards. All four jobs were as a software developer.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
When I was looking for a job (Jan-Mar 2002) I used Monster, careerbuilder, and a few others. They all amounted to nothing. I had a few interviews; but it is hard to stick out from 400 other people willing to take any job they can get. I learned, again, that personal relationships and networking are your best tools in finding a job.
As a side note, I was fired from the job I had until Jan 2002 because so many people were calling my employer looking for a reference, even though every place I had hooked into said not to do so.
I doubt that I would ever use any service like that again. There is just not enough control.
I dont think these techie job boards are a joke. At one point they worked. But when you have thousands of IT people out of work, it just doesnt work. If things ever get better(new president please), maybe these job sites will be of value again.
Alan Greenspan is SO WRONG
Mine was a full-time permanent position.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Their hiring policy was that any job posting HAD to be posted publicly for at least 48 hours, and they used Monster.com for this purpose. In that time period, they recieved about 90 resumes for my position.
How do I know this? It was my job to sort my boss's email and print them out.
There was absolutely no intention to read any of these resumes or invite anyone for an interview. I stopped taking online job searches seriously after this experience.
As an off-topic post-script:
Six months to the day after I was hired, I was laid off because my job was automated. Actually, it was at my six-month evaluation... after taking most of my work away from me, the new manager stated that I didn't seem to be "working out" the way they expected. I found out later from a coworker that they never intended to hire me in the first place, as they always intended on automating my position, but the "offshore" programmer that they hired to write the program that automated my job, took longer than they expected. If they kept me on beyond the six months, I would have to get severance pay!
These new automated reports were skimpy and full of errors, but only a handfull of people actually read them... so it really didn't matter to anyone.
I like to imagine that there was once a time where people weren't so disposable... but I'm sure that's not true.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
I did contract work from 1999 until I took a permanent job earlier this year.
I got a lot of leads via Monster and other job boards.
Job boards did fine for me.
Expert Java EE Consulting
I use monster.com for social engineering, works great when the business tells you all the types of hardware and software they use. half the work is done!
...is a combination of:
1) there is a vast number of people in the job market at the moment. A lot of these people have relatively low-skill level.
2) it so easy for people to apply to every job out on there on the job boards, whether they are qualified or not.
This means any company that advertizes positions on these sites are deluged with hundreds of resumes - the chances that they are even going to look at your resume seriously are low.
Having said that, most people I talk who are hiring still have a very difficult time trying to find good people.
In my experience, one of the best ways to get a new job is to follow people you've worked with before (and who you respect - and respect you) to other companies.
Good people tend to stick together. Companies are much more likely to hire someone who not a complete 'unknown', and you are more likely to enjoy a new workplace if you already know people there (and that can vouch it is a good place to work).
We use job boards not monster or hot jobs though, we like craigslist and kitlist. We find some good candidates but most (249 out of 278 so far) are from people who don't read the job posting they just send their resume hoping they'll fit. That's very frustrating. We're filling a Junior Engineering position with 5 years being the maximum allowed experience. We're getting crap from VP's of Engineering, Senior Software Architect / Toilet Flushers etc. etc. If I read one more resume from a guy who led a world class team of top developers creating the next generation, end-to-end, J2EE, Oracle Enabled development envionment for toasters that allow them to toast evenly on both sides I'm going to scream...
We tried it once. The number resume's we got was tremendous. The number of them from people with names we could pronounce was about 10. The number of those that we could understand was about 5. The number of those willing to relocate was about 3. The number of those with technical and communcation skills we considered mandatory was about 0.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
Here's a post from above from 'cshark':
"I indescriminantly send my resume to recruiter I can, if my skills match what they're looking for or not. I get a lot of calls from confused recruiters, but after about a month of doing it for six to ten hours a day, I usually end up getting my resume into the right hands, or hopefully several pairs of right hands. Works every time. Just takes a little patience. There's a lot of competition out there these days."
Combine that with "HR has to keep all resumes on file for $FOO years" and the only people who are happy are the document management and NAS salespeople.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Unless you live in india. Then, may I suggest monsterphilipines.com?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I wish I listened. I posted my resume and was innundated with MLM offers, "career counsuling" and resume writing services, and "opportunities" to become a "branch manager" with Citibank (!?), who was opening 50+ branches in my area (!?).
Beware: if you post your information on Monster or the other general job boards, you *will* get email that sounds like a request for an interview for a position but is careful constructed to *not* precisely say that it's really a high-priced Want Ad re-distribution scam. Oops. What a joke. Here's a sample:
I wrote back saying that a simple Google search on his company's name turned up numerous "Pxxxx-Txxxx is a SCAM!" web pages and, knowing the Internet is want to exaggerate grievances, could he answer back a short statement to easy my apprehension. No response. I guess my impressive credentials weren't impressive enough to warrant the effort...However, having been on the other side as an employer looking to fill a tech position I found Monster quite effective at producing skads of resumes for me to glean from. Wow. An entry level position with high bar qualifications garnered quite a number of resumes. However, this being the Internet, it is all too easy to click and send a resume/application for a job that you're not qualified for or that you're not truly interested in. I was not impressed with the candidates.
So, it's true: it's who you know. My best jobs, my best hires -- those I've had personal contact with.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If all you're doing is posting your resume on a job-hutning site, and then going and playing video games, you probably don't want a job that bad. There are a lot more job-hunters than there are jobs, and I don't think I want to leave my future in the hands of keyword matching techniques. ;-)
I use job listing websites to harvest local company names. When it's time for me to job hunt, I'll actually go to the company's web site, and look at their most up-to-date job listings. Then, I'll make an ACTIVE effort to apply for jobs that are presented. If the company sounds particularly compelling, but doesn't have any openings listed, I'll contact them expressing interest anyway. Just because they don't have a particular job listed at this very moment doesn't mean you can't get it. They might realize, "Oh hey, we COULD use someone to do that."
Of course, I'm a grad student right now, so what do I know, right?
Really, at this point, this IS all guesswork on my part, but I like to think that I make sence *grin*. I'm interested in hearing about what other people have to say about the relation between job-hunting effort, and job-hunting success.
^o^
My second programming job came from monster - a really good 9 month contract at a major Seattle corporation doing PHP (yes, PHP) programming. The headhunters saw my resume on there, called me up, interviewed me within a couple of days, and I started within a week.
When that contract was over, I put my resume out on monster again, and I used their search agents. It found a perl programming position, which I applied for, and got the position after two phone interviews and an in-person interview.
First, he calls these services ineffective because they only fill a few percent of the jobs nationwide. But that percentage jumped from 2.5% 2 years ago to 5% last year (total, for all job boards.) Given that rate, it'll be at 40% in a few years.
Second, he doesn't discuss what fraction of jobs are even posted on these boards. If only 20% of the jobs are posted on these boards, and 5% of them are filled from resumes on them, that's a pretty good percentage.
Last, recruiters use these boards as well, and they probably aren't included in the 5%. The hiring company wouldn't know where the recruiter found your resume.
Overall, I got quite a few hits from the job boards. Some of them were direct and some through recruiters. Not a bad route, especially for high-tech jobs, in my experience.
For what it's worth, I got one contract through the job boards, and then a full-time job through a referral last time I was looking.
The job before that I got through searching the web (altavista at the time) for my keywords. I found several possible companies that had ads on their site but not on the national job boards via google last time I was hunting as well...
SKG
He states that "newspaper ads delivered 4.8% of new hires" but "employers filled fewer than 1.5% of their jobs through CareerBuilder?" So he is comparing all newspapers to just one jobsite. If you compare all newspapers (4.8%) to just the three jobsites listed (5.6%) you see that going online is better than looking through the newspaper. And there are a bunch more online job resources that he didn't give percentages from. This still pales in comparison to using your social networks, but why wouldn't you do all three?
The job sites kept sending me nothing but "work at home" jobs (probably stuffing envelopes or telemarketing or something else distasteful.) The headhunters (when I could get one to return my calls, that is) sent me nothing but low-paying entry-level jobs that didn't interest me at all.
Heheh... I got one off Monster or Hotjobs - can't remember which. They called me up and we arranged an interview in a rented hotel boardroom. They wouldn't tell me the name of the company citing secrecy (note that I've worked for defense contractors, so I've seen this before); just told me that it suited me based on my profile.
Well, I donned my best suit and tie and went to the interview.
Turned out they wanted me to be a cold-calling life insurance salesman, paid commission only. I started yelling right there in the meeting room about how they'd wasted my time. Made sure to tell the rest of the people who were waiting there with me that it was a scam. 4 other job-seekers left.
Man, was I furious.
Then, there's the horror story of the spam that comes from these places. Got one offer, just the other day, of a waiter position at Swiss Chalet (Canadian chicken joint). Apparently, they pulled my e-mail address from one of the sites and started hitting me with it. I've since dealt with the problem (sending a warning to Cara Operations which runs Swiss Chalet that their headhunters are spamming).
Another site to *avoid* is 2jobsearch.net. When I put my resume there in 2001, they looked like a real recruiter. Now, I get the daily "AIONetwork Newsletter" which is just spam for debt consolidation scams with domain names like biz-dot.net and places like that. Fortunately, their spam is easy to filter, even though their upstream provider (startdedicated.com) has received loads of spam complaints from me and apparently refuses to do anything.
Forget the job hunting websites, they're just crap. Pound the pavement yourself.
I'm a creative problem-solver. With each resume that I hand-delivered with properly-researched names on the cover letter, I attached a small can of WD-40. In the cover letter, I referred to it as a problem-solver, just like me. Indeed, it got my resume noticed, and I got a bunch of interviews and offers from it.
Just keep working at it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
In Maine there is a site called JobsInME.com I got my job there. It's becoming more popular in this area because it sorts by county and gives all the information in an easy format. Monster and CareerBuilder aren't even used by businesses in this area. For IT jobs it turns out to be nearly the only option. The website is also available in other states in New England but appears to only have caught on in Maine. JobsinMA.com has next to nothing on it.
"no one knows how to fill in the void called america" --the discovery channel
No technology solution will replace the value of your human contacts. They know you and can vouch for you. They'll pass you on to other people they know whom they trust. They won't give you PR-speak or HR-speak. They'll scratch your back, with the expectation that somewhere down the road you'll scratch theirs.
If you don't have a solid network of people in your industry, a job board is better than nothing. But if you want a job you'll really like, a nod in the right direction from someone who knows you is the way to get it. Would you rather hire a number, or someone who has been recommended to you by one of your contacts?
Learn Java. Become a Linux whiz. Build servers in your spare time. All of these things are useful in getting a job, but building a solid human network is more important by far in an extremely competitive job market.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
However it isn't a matter of just registering and waiting for the offers given the current market. I used the sites to find agencies, and actively applied to every single position that looked remotely interesting, sent mails to every employment agency that listed positions along the lines I was looking for, and updated my CV or "renewed it" (on Monster you can, or at least could, just click on a link to get to the top of the pile again) on the sites EVERY day to make sure my CV was looked at.
It got me several calls from recruiters, and a new job starting last summer at the same salary I had at my previous job, despite the general tenedency being that people in my type of positions took steep pay cuts to move into more secure positions last year. But the number of responses (including people telling me the position had been filled) I got was perhaps 1 in 50 - the rest just didn't bother answering at all.
Another thing to keep in mind, though, is that you MUST make sure you follow up the recruiters. They will NOT follow up you if you don't show interest. I got calls about a couple of positions that I wasn't too interested in, but that I told the recruiters to put me forward for anyway, to find out more, the ones where I wasn't on the phone to the recruiters daily never got back to me at all.
These people are still drowning in CV's and you can assume that when they call you they have probably already called 10 other people. Of anyone qualified they will hire one of the few that are actively spending time trying to understand what their clients want and helps them provide it.
The last thing to keep in mind is: Your CV MUST be keyword friendly to be successful on these sites. In my case, I'd originally not mentioned much about Microsoft products and kept to my core competencies, even though I have in the past used Office and even (I am ashamed to say) programmed Word macros. Many job specs will mention things like Office etc. even if they are completely peripheral to the job - the recruiters will put it into their searches anyway if they get to many results with more relevant keywords.
The other deficiency my CV originally had was that recruiters tend to search for the degree level the employer asks for, while many (most?) tech employers are relatively flexible (the main exception being banks that tend to be really anal about it) about your formal qualifications if you have relevant experience - in my case I quit uni to start my first company at 19. When I added (truthfully) that I am currently taking a MSc. as a correspondence course in my spare time (mostly to "get the paper" for future job hunts...) the level of interest suddenly increased a lot, including for positions where the employer had stated an MSc. as an "absolute requirement".
Do anything except lie to get the interviews - the recruiters often don't know the position well enough to judge whether you'd be suitable... :)
i too got a job using monster 4 years ago. but sadly now after being out of work for 4 months, the only responses i get are spam. these boards do work for some, but for most companies theyre just too big. its hard to choose from 100000 resumes.
from a temp agency that saw my resume on monster.com. I had put the resume there only two weeks earlier. At the time, I only had 7 months experience in the IT industry. I was hired permanantly by the first company they placed me with 6 months later and have been here for nearly 3 years now.
Technoli
I suppose this could be either the worst of all evils, or a slight improvement on things: www.workzoo.com
Anyone know of any other job meta-searches?
Even in remote areas I've found that most IT jobs are not even advertised unless the requirements are unbeleivable.
An example of the FEW IT jobs listed via online job-sites and print media:
1) C++ Programmer, 5+ years experience, BS degree in related field (all required - very clearly states do not apply if you don't have atleast the experience stated).
Payscale: $10 an hour! WTF! You can make TWICE that driving a FORKLIFT!
2) System admin, must have 10+ years experience in a 'large scale san architecture,' BS required
Languages required: C, VB, Java, Perl
Payscale: $45k/year + benefits
(Not _horrible_ - but for those skills and the level of responsibility - that's pathetic.)
3) Wireless Administrator, BS in related field required, 5+ years wireless administration experience, C/C++, VB
Payscale: 55k + benefits (Again, not horrible but for the experience required that is pathetic pay. As well, this company is the _ONLY_ wireless access provider within almost 400 miles. This job has been open and being ADVERTISED for OVER 7 months now. LoL. I'll bet they've spent 55k advertising it - it's in EVERY Sunday paper through FOUR publications - as well as on careerbuilder.com, hotjobs.com, dice.com, monster.com and probably others.)
Those are just about the only jobs posted within 100 miles of where I live... There have, however, been two oddball positions advertised just recently, both by FedEx;
1) Computer Operator - basically just requires some past experience in IT and a HSD.
Payscale: $45k / year + benefits
Very competative salary for the position in this area.
2) IT Director - BS +2 years management experience required, a few other little 'prefered' notes - etc...
Payscale - "up to" $135k/year + benefits "DOE"
An extremely competative wage for this area. Most executive officers in this area would envy that salary. The downfall, however, to this position -- is that it's located 60 miles in the middle of FREAKING NOWHERE! Literally 'in the mountains.' You would either drive 2 and 1/2 hours to get to work each day, from the 'closest [town],' or live deep in the mountains.
IMO, a great plus. But a major turnoff to many geeks.
All in all, as many here have already stated - it generally seems IT jobs are a behind the scenes deal. They are all being taken up by insiders, whether it be within the company or a friend of someone who works there.
Networking seems to be the way to discover these positions. Being that I just relocated to the area I am at, this is impossible for me -- as I simply do not know anyone here.
What I ended up doing was making a rolodex of HR managers to contact on a weekly basis - and scheduled out contact times to continue contact with a list of local companies until a position comes open. I have found this to be an extremely successfull method.
Relying strictly on traditional publications, staffing firms, and online job-sites -- in my experience -- will not produce results. The jobs that make it that far through the vicious IT cycle are trash jobs that no one wanted.
This, of course, is merely my opinion -- and is obviously reflective only of the area I live in.
Two years ago, when I had been laid off for four months, an in-house recruiter at a company I was not interviewing with told me the following.
She said all recruiters post to the Internet job boards simply becuase they're supposed to as part of their job. They do not expect to find candidates from these boards. Furthermore, these boards are a hassle, since they make it so easy to apply for a job. They get volumes of resumes for each posting they send to the boards, and most of the candidates have no experience relevant to the job being posted.
So, they trash the resumes they receive, without even bothering to sort through them!
She advised me to use the old-fashioned way - networking. Hiring managers give more weight to resumes they receive from direct referrals. Also, most direct referrals bypass the in-house recruiters and go directly to the hiring manager, which guarantees your resume will get seen by someone with hiring authority.
I followed her advise, and received three offers within two months.
workzoo.com. Not sure if this is the worst of it all or the best. But it exists. I found a few good perl jobs in the bay area.
Welcome to Slashdot!
I've found seek - http://www.seek.com.au to be quite good - I've got my last three jobs (including my current one) from seek.
...it's the people who post their inflated resumes on their that make the whole thing not work. My company has tried using the boards to recruit people for various positions, however it seems that with no hint of human screening/QA process candidates on the whole feel free not to just exagerate a little but blatently lie about their techinical skillsets.
Take for example one candidate who I recently interviewed, they had on their resume a very niche skill that I happen to be trained in, so I asked them about this particular skill and it was then that the candidate responded,"Well, I've not actually worked with *******, but it's something I've thought about getting into". WTF?!?! This candidate had this item listed in their core technical skillsets!! That's like me putting down I'm a doctor then saying,"Well, I've watched ER a few times and I think I like the look of that"
I'd say that 95% of the people we interviewed from job boards turned out to have exceptionally inflated resumes and were demanding the same inflated salaries that they had when they were still in work a year or two ago. We found that going with a recruiting company that has real people there to at least weed some of the wheat from the chaff is a better approach, although we still do get a lot of inflated resumes through that are from people that are good enough to get around the simple questions posed by the headhunter.
Come on man, now EVERYONE's gonna do it.
I am an IT director for a smaller consulting group. I can tell you that I've NEVER had a 'good batch' of resumes from Monster or CareerBuilder. Both were far too expensive for the resumes that we received.
The best resumes ALWAYS come from a Newspaper ad that has people respond to an email address, referencing a specific job in the 'Subject' field. I immediately weed out the people that can't use email, or follow directions. I know they are all local, and can start weeding from there.
I spent $500 for an ad on CareerBuilder, and got 400 resumes, about 6 were usefull and none were hired. I spent $75 on a newspaper ad, got 90 resumes, and ended up with about 10 that I could have hired. MUCH better results...
My
I got my current gig via CareerBuilder, at a software consulting firm. Took about 2 weeks to land this gig after leaving my last one.
There are so many variables involved in finding a job, though - experience, skill, education, locale, competition, time of year, etc etc - I don't know that you can patently say that any one methodology for finding employment is faulty, given the myriad variables involved.
Hi,
I run workzoo.com, a job meta-search. We try to filter out work at home and (hope none of them are reading this) by simply looking for job titles in all caps.
Mark.
Headhunters are a weird lot. First of all, they don't care a lick about the job seeker. They are after employers. Quite often a headhunter will get a lead on a job from an employer. When this happens they will then run around and try to find a list of candidates that will fit the job.
In this regard, posting your resume on a job board is not a bad thing. If you have a good clean resume with the right keywords, there is a chance that a headhunter with a legitimate job will find you. Anyway, having realised that headhunters work for employers and not for me, I've learned that they can provide a legitimate service.
If I was unemployed, I'd give monster & hunters a try, but would expect little out of them - your best bet by a mile is contacts.
My first job out of college was found at a career fair.
My second was found through Monster.
My third was found through the Sunday classifieds.
Every job was obtained through "job bazzars." Not one was gained through personal contacts. Even my ex, who can get "ten letters of recommendations from multi-millionares," couldn't pull the right strings (althogh she tried... I think) to help me find work.
All three jobs were great, too. I'm still at the third, and hope that I can work here until I die.
The middle mind speaks!
I have used Monster.com before for finding candidates. The amount of resumes you can view are useful, but you still have to weed out the bad ones. I also like using phpcareer.com and zend.com for reviewing resumes. PHP/SQL programmer position open! Reply to this message if interested in hearing more!
I completed a contract at Lucent in April of 2001 and didn't land a full time job or contract until April 2002. After the first couple of months, when I realized that this "down" market was very, very different than previous ones, I decide to try using some job sites. I noticed right away that there were a lot fewer jobs posted than ever before by a factor of 10. Prior to 2001, if you posted your resume on a site, you would be inundated with phone calls and e-mails for weeks after you had already started a new job or contract. In fact, getting a job was so easy in the late 90's that posting your resume was a sign that you were naive, inexperienced, or had no friends in the industry. In 2001, however, with all the massive layoffs, suddenly the web was flooded with the resumes of very good people at the same time that jobs were being eliminated. Most of the callbacks I got during 2001 were from agents or headhunters who were getting desperate and were trying to grab the best people and try and shop them around. At that time, I found that Monster.com was somewhat different than most of the other sites (like CareerBuilder), in that more of the contacts were from the companies hiring (actual company recruiters) rather than independent agents or headhunters. Now, two years later, just out of curiosity I checked out some of these web sites, and I found that the jobs posted have declined by another factor of 10, and there are virtually no jobs of the quality that there were in 1999 - 2000. Search criteria that returned thousands of jobs in 1999 are coming back empty. I have agents who were very "fat" in the 90s now calling me for leads on jobs. So I think that these web sites, in this economy, are useless. They used to be very good at finding the right job to fit your particular skillset and "priorites" at a time when there were more jobs than "qualified" people to fill them; but nowadays, with downsizing and outsourcing, there's a not enough "supply" and way too much demand.
One thing I did discover though, during 2001, was that it was possible to get freelance work on the web from sites like freeagent.com and guru.com. I managed to support my family (didn't miss a mortgage payment ) for a year with freelance work. I made only 2/3 of what I was used to making, but that was better than most in my situation. Alas, I'm not sure that these sites are as good as they used to be. Guru.com is no longer around (if you try to go to their site, you will be redirected to a site called emoonlighter.com) . I think we just have to come to grips with the reality that the "glory days" are over. The best way to find a job is through networking. Many employers these days realize that there's a lot of good people out there and rather than pay a headhunter or agent they give their employees bonuses for successful referrals. This is the policy at the company I work for.
We have kept stats on the number of jobs each site has in our own categories since 2000 and there has been a HUGE decline in IT job postings. The simple fact is that there are no IT jobs in the USA right now unless you are connected. As soon as a job is posted, it's moot.
Mark
workzoo.com - Job meta search.
Speaking as a manager of a small IT department, I've had some success with Monster and Dice over the years. I usually post jobs to Monster and maybe also in a local paper. I generally get a slew of irrelevant resumes and a few good ones. The trick is to get good at sorting through the crap. There really are a lot of clueless people out there who don't know how to put together a resume, and/or don't care at all about whether or not they even come close to matching the requirements for a job.
:-)
I know that a lot of people looking for jobs don't have much luck with these sites, but there are legitimate jobs out there. For instance, if you're looking for a Lotus Notes programming job in NJ right now, search Monster or Dice, and you'll find something...
These Websites are no different than the function served by the help wanted section of the newspaper up until just a few years ago. Companies have various legal and internal policy requirments to satisfy and the job websites satisfy these requirements just as listing in newpapers have in the past. In fact, it is considered high-tech that laws and corporate policy permits the use of the web for these purposes.
Unfortunately, the laws and corporate policies driving this segment of job listings has little to do with actual hiring. Instead, they are used to justify H1B hiring, selection of internal people for specific positions, elimination of positions, etc. In other words, there is good reason to treat most job listings on the web and in the help wanted section as suspect at best.
If you are serious about your job hunt, then you really do need to focus on the one proven technique that continues to work, even during the current depression in the software market. That technique, and this should be no surprise, is NETWORKING.
Use the websites as a contact point where you might make contact with someone with whom you can network. But, there are many other places that are effective for networking... and since many of them have a more personal element (voice on the phone, handshake in person), they tend to be more effective. This is not to say that you should not try the websites, only that they should be one part of a broader effort.
You're right, the headhunters and the job boards do suck balls.
major apparel manufacturing compoany located in midtown Manhattan is seeking a HelpDesk Support Analyst for a FULL TIME opportunity.
Here in NYC, the worthless headhunters call you saying they have some terrific job that you'd be perfect for, but they want you to stop in so they can go over it for you. You get all dolled up, make your way to their office, only to find that they have NOTHING. The bastards are just fishing to up the size of their "possible applicants" database. They invite you in because they have a quota of geeks they need to see per week in person (To make sure we don't have mohawks or facial tattoos).
Those people are the downfall of our industry.
Just today I received an E-mail from one of those people. Check out this criteria! (I cut and pasted)
______________________________________________
Requirements include:
1) Current working experience with Lotus Notes/Domino R5.0.11 Administration and RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server;
2) MCSE with Windows 2000 Server, Windows Active Directory, Windows XP and Windows 2000 desktop OS and VERITAS Backup Exec (9.0/9.1) experience;
3) Any Captaris' RightFax network fax server, Quickplace, Sametime collaborative tools, Cisco Catalyst GigE, 3Com PoE,QoS, CoS, LAN switching, HTTP/S, VLAN, SSL, DHCP and DNS management are PLUSES.
Responsibilities include:
1) General troubleshooting of desktop PC issues (printers, file sharing, permissions, etc.) in a network environment;
2) Imaging and rolling out new PCs for users, configuring desktop apps and network fileshares, monitoring backups and restores as necessary on both the Domino and Windows servers, server builds, network maintenance, and security.
____________________________________
So basically they're looking for a help desk person that's a unix/linux/windows/cisco and server administrator who just happens to have his or her MCSE.
ACK! Monster and Headhunters both suck balls.
I'm still hoping someone will pick up the torch where Catalyst Recruiting dropped it and develop a Free alternative to these lame job portals. So much of the work is already done. You can see a demo here. All the code is GPL.
Can your IM do this?
I used to poke around the vault.com forums for random information, and I can firmly say that investment bankers DO in fact spend more time talking about hiding places in the office to sneak naps than about compensation and business.
I run two job web sites.
One is for graduates and any company can advertise and one is to deliver the sales jobs for a particular recruitment agency.
Job agencies often get paid by placing candidates for interview. We would usually achieve this by emailing the registered members. Someone at interview is probably going to get the job.
Once we have companies on board it is quite rare that they cancel their arrangements with us. We place a high number of candiates.
I know directly that Monster make a lot of money, they are a multi million pound company. Impossible if they don't place candidates.
We've seen quite a bit of negative press regarding online recruitment recently.
One of our competitors recently went bust.
I think a lot of money was been spent in this area and the rewards aren't quite what people thought they would be. Job hunting, like many other things, can't rely on the internet alone but to dismiss online recruitment out of hand is to miss some of it's strength. Finding ot of town jobs is very difficult and the internet can bring them closer.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Every job I have held since I finished my US Army enlistment has been found thru either Monster (or their predecessor, OCC) or Cyber Coders.
..."
I got my first civilian job thru OCC while I was still in Germany (I had to hop on a C141 MAC flight to DC for the interview, it was a blast!). I got my second civilian job thru monster. The first code I wrote for them was, check this out, an online jobs site!
My third job was thru Cybercoders. That one was really neat, I still remember the subject line from the recruiters email: "This is the mother of all web programming jobs
My current job was also thru monster. Job #3 was going thru layoff hell and around a Wednesday evening I got hinted that I would be laid off that same Friday. Sometime around 2 AM on Thursday I applied to 13 jobs thru monster. That day around noon I was contacted directly by the company, and we interviewed over the phone for close to two hours. Friday was judgement day: layoff meetings thru the day, and none of us knew who would get hit. I interviewed at 9:30 AM and spent the morning interviewing, doing proficiency tests for SQL, etc. I took the metro across town to my job not knowing if I still had a job there. I was called in and told that I had been spared at the last second but that I had to prove my loyalty because things were rough and the survivors were going to take a 20% pay cut. I said sure, count me in.
That happened Friday at 3 PM. Monday morning I had a technical interview over the phone, but it was b/s: at 3 or so in the afternoon I got my offer letter fedexed. I accepted it on the spot and gave my company a one-week notice as a way to repay them for cutting my salary 20%.
BTW, that Friday one of my best friends got laid off. He had taken the afternoon off to go interview elsewhere, and they called him on his cell to fire him! The bastard beat me. He got *his* offer fedexed to him at least 3 hours before I got mine.
Online recruiting works, just make sure you don't fall for predatory recruiters, who are worse than used car salesmen. Monster needs to do a better job keeping these bastards from canvassing the system, because there is nothing more frustrating than recruiters calling every 15 minutes saying you are totally qualified to do the job they are hunting for, but then ask you what you do and if you can send them a resume.
If they are real customers of Monster they already have your resume, and they should know what you do and if you are experienced. Anyone that calls you and asks for a resume and doesnt have a clue is cold calling you and you should hang up on the spot.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
My company is a small (about $1 million in revenue last year) software and consulting firm and we actually use Dice to find candidates.
It's true that you need to wade through the crop to find the cream but our secretary does that for us when she isn't answering the phones.
Another small business owner said that they couldn't afford the $500/mo for Monster or so, but for us, it's a lot cheaper and easier to get the National exposure we need to find actual qualified candidates.
I will say that if you are looking to get hired at a large corporation, their HR never posts to the job boards, all you'll find is headhunters posting for them. Your best bet is to find job postings on their corporate sites and apply that way, or use the newspaper.
If you are a consultant, however, I think that the job boards are the easiest way to find a job. Just don't wait for them to come to you, you have to actually do some looking on your own.
All that being said, absolutely nothing is better than working your own personal network.
I was laid off from an IT position late last year - Got a job through Monster.com.
I combed the job postings online, as well as in the newspapers, etc... While I got a few emails, mostly I got a whole lot of nothing--occasionally broken by a request for my equal employment info....
One day I sent in a resume for a position that could only be done by submitting my resume directly to Monster. While I was filling out all their stuff online, I saw the checkmark for making the resume searchable... I figured what the heck, I'm using a toss-away email address.
Less than 3 days later I was contacted by a temp agency to see if I would be OK with them submitting my resume to a local company. I said sure, why not. The rest is a funny story in and of itself...
Turns out, it was a direct hire for a great company. Personally, I think that the job was a needle in the haystack - I turned in 80 resumes for jobs and heard back on less than 1 out of 10 of them.
In addition, some job listings are posted day after day, month after month. I can't believe that with all the skilled people out of work, nobody qualified, local (or willing to relocate) applied.
Man, I was just a poor pimp hustlin' crack whores, but I got on monster.com and, man, now I'm CTO for escorts.com! I don't know what they're talking about!
Every job I've had save one was through a friend or someone I have worked with.
I got into a 7 year gig in Broadcast TV through an old HS friend. I jumped into my first 3 years in IT through another old High School buddy.
From there I got a contract at Intel through a friend from my first IT job.
That was 2000.. Intel stock droped (well so did everyone else too) and the Layoffs started..
I posted a resume on Monster and 3-4 other boards, got picked up by a headhunter, placed in a Job I hated after 2 days, Called the head of HR from my first IT job (oh look another friend) and got an offer from her, quit the bad job on day 3 and never missed a day of work.
Now one of the guys I met at the bad job works here because He remembered me and I gave him a good recomendation.
Now the Datacenter is relocating to Denver, Everyone that's not going is pulling out all the contacts they can.. And ya know what? it's working!
+9
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
In my searches so far, Dice.com is the best site that I know about. I found out about my current job from a posting there. Monster.com has a number of problems. First, it is not IT oriented; Dice.com is entirely technical. Fewer jobs but higher quality and laser focused. Secondly, Monster.com accepts a LOT of "spam" ads - the posting equivalent of "Make $500/hr in your spare time" kind of email spam. After awhile you can tell what they are, but the fact that they are tolerated at all says something about the integrity and seriousness of Monster.com.
If you are a specialist in some (engineering) area then you can have a higher chance putting your resume on Monster. Think about it, putting a job listing in local newspapers is not sufficient, headhunters will check the widest job databases to find someone fitting with a very special skill. And the easiest to check are those internet databases. Make use of the multiple resumes you can post on Monster, don't use a 'one size fits all' resume, show off your specialties on the very first line, create a resume for the job YOU want to find. I did it, was contacted within a week and it worked out great. And only because of Monster, I missed the job listing in the paper. With a listing of all your specialties without any indication of what you are looking for you are just 1 of 90000 records in a database, all alike. No headhunter has time to check on all of those resumes. If you are looking for 'just a job' I think the best resources might be in your local newspaper and network your way around.
I know plenty of ppl who have got jobs via the Aussie job sites
BUT most ppl have to apply for something like 200 jobs before getting one!
---- Put Sig here:
I went through two periods of unemployment in the last few years, one for six months and one for four, and during those times must have sent dozens of resumes to postings on internet job boards. Never got a single response.
And before you ask, my resume was quite well done (albeit conservative) and I tailored every cover letter to the company I was applying to. I got responses from newspaper ads, but not a single one from internet job boards. I think basically the HR dept just throws the responses in the trash bin.
The only place I post jobs is Craigslist.
If you're looking for work, perusing openings on Craigslist is a good idea.
I tried looking on Monster, and all those, but nothing came of it. My resume only got 40 views in a few months.
Then I posted my resume on Craigslist (mostly for San Francisco Bay Area), at 11pm, and less than 12 hours later, I had an offer to come in for an interview. I'm posting this from that employeer. Yes, they know I surf Slashdot.
Was called into my bosses office recently asking me if I was "happy" with my current job. Had a few issues to talk to him about already, but come to find out, HR had found my resume on Monster and emailed it directly to my manager. Monster's blocking software either was not that effective for current employees OR my HR had actually used a different login to find me. (Sneaky bastards..).
Sig it.
Hi,
.02.
As a hiring manager, I have an in-house recruiter. Her job is to wade through the many resumes offered by Monster, HotJobs and such sites, and the resume's we get from recruiters, using guidelines I have given her. I see maybe 10% or so. Of those 10%, I give a straight-up No to 50%, usually due to lack of relevent experience (even if the keywords match).
She then calls them and asks a few choice questions: in this instance,
1) depth of your Windows and Unix knowledge (user versus administrator versus coded with Platform SDK;
2) types of development done (toolsmithing, line coder, project lead; senior tech lead);
3) some specialized knowledge for the position (you put PKI experience near the beginning of your resume - can you explain how certificates are validated and what a CRL does? She doesn't know the answer, but she knows an answer other than 'Well, I just installed the certificate on my <X> and they work' is probably adequate for this barrier).
Then, they get to me. I ask them similar questions to the above, but more depth and breadth, and I evaluate the answer to be something _reasonable_: an answer to the above might be, 'Certificates have a chain of trust starting at a root that you have recieved out-of-band, where the root signs with RSA or DH or whatever the child's public key. If you receive a child and intermediate certificates, you can check that it is valid by checking the parent's signature down the tree, and thus you can trust something because you trust one of their parents. There's also Key Usage and EKU attached to the cert, which tells you what the certificate was intended to be used as, which you should check too. A Certificate Revocation List is the way a cert authority can invalidate a set of certificates and their children for future use.' . Etc. Something along those lines.
That's what _I_ mean when I say I'm knowledgable with PKI (actually, I go far farther than this into the bowels, but whatever), so this is what I presume someone else should say. If they don't, then I give them a no - the moral here is 'don't inflate your resume' - at least in a way I can tell.
Finally, I meet them face-to-face, and take deeply into account my intuition the first 30-60 seconds I have when talking to them. I try to make sure they are 'smart' - quick thinking, clear on what they know and not, out-of-the-box methodologies.
After I decide they are smart, whatever 'smart' actually is (I don't know, it's just a tag I use for certain qualities, which includes the above, as well as quick comprehension, the appearance of sanity, and good presentation, both of which are important, and yes I know I might lose a brilliant but antisocial introvert - but that's okay, since they won't do as well here for this position anyway), I am on the watch for questions which lead myself or other people to think 'no' - they meet other people, we look up their background, check their references, etc.
On average, I phone screen about a 1-2 dozen people, I interview about 2-3, I hire one.
Having done the above 10 times now, I've actually got one of the best Quality groups I've ever worked with - highly paid, self-starting and extremely effective.
Oh, did I forget to mention I was hiring QA (QE, really) people, and I expect them to talk about their years of development background? Another moral of the story - if you do something well, you probably can do many things well, and sometimes developers move to the quality side instead of large projects side because they _LIKE_ it (or, in some cases, because there are plenty of things about development not to like, and at least being in QE, they can automate to make the things that suck, suck less).
Anyway, my
-J
Anyway, my last two jobs were found through Jobserve. A nice, simple, easy-to-use site with a lot of listed jobs and a half decent search engine. It's worked for me twice in a row getting work in a large multinational IT company so I can't complain. Certainly a LOT easier than the traditional paper based job hunting techniques.
Does anyone in IT even use these boards to look for a job?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. More appropriate would be, "does any serious company use these boards to hire?" My experience is that most companies go with headhunting firms they can have an ongoing relationship with. HR departments love the synergy.
When you see a listing on a job board, don't just e-mail them your resume... I guarantee, no one will notice yours among the hundreds they probably received (many of whom having no business applying for the position, but did so any because "e-mail's free, what could it hurt?")
CALL the company, try to drop it off in person or get a meeting... Even a resume sent by fax or regular mail will have a better chance of standing out.
In December we posted a sales position to monster.com. It was the first job we ever advertised using them, and from what I heard, it was a good way to generate lots of prospective employees. In it, we listed the responsibilities and minimum experience required for the position. We also said -- clearly -- that we wanted applicants to call us instead of send resumes. (We get lots of resumes, all they do is take up space in the "Keep this or the lawyers will make money" file cabinet.) What we wanted was a sales person to call us and demonstrate their skills on the phone.
The responses: Zip.
Oh, there were resumes sent to us. They were sent in exactly the way we told people not to. There were even two phone calls. No body had skills that were even close to what we were looking for. I quickly came to the conclusion that most job seekers on monster are so jaded by looking for work that they don't even bother to read the posting and just click "send" on their resume.
Score Monster 1 - Us 0
Monster made their money, we got Zip. I might as well have written the job posting on toilet paper and stocked the bathroom in our building with it... Never mind... That would have gotten a better response..
In the end, we filled the position the old way. Via the network of customers and vendors we have build over the years, and by asking "Hey, do you know anyone who can do the job..."
Any other employer have a similar experience?
I hate head hunters because they are so corrupt and in bed with HR managers. Some times when I apply for a job at a company, a few days later I get a call from a head hunter telling me they have jobs matching my exact background at a completely different company. Adobe was one company that was very notable. I once applied there for an image processing programming job, and 3 days later a head hunter contacted me telling me that they can find Graphincs/Imaging work. I said I wasnt looking. How did they figure out I was looking an imaging? I guess there are corrupt HR people everywhhere. If the HR dept hires a person there is not much of an incentive... its their job. But if a head hunter hires a person for the company its about 20K they have to pay the head hunter... so connect the dots, and you figure out.
so they seem to work for me.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I got laid off at the end of 2003, my sysadmin position in a small company was eliminated to cut costs, when a 22yr old (who can jump higher!) can do the same job for 1/2 the pay, it pays to get rid of the pro!
In the past two months of job searching it's been tough... sending resume's, posting on job sites, checking job sites, sending emails, follow-up phone calls.
I've gotten a few interviews, both first and second level... still nothing.
I've been asking all my tech buddies and friends to keep their eyes and ears open. The interviews I've been on were from jobs NOT obtained from job sites.
Here's my personal "pet peeves" list of things that make me sick...
--- Agencies calling to get you to come to their office (Boston downtown), for jobs that I later find DO NOT EXIST, they just want your resume/name on their system so they can have more chance of landing the commission from getting someone a job or to keep quota's up.
--- Not getting some kind of response (whether you were successful) when you have interviewed for a position and you have to call to find out that the job has been filled! Or better still, you find out that a diversity policy was in place so it would not have mattered one way or another, they just wanted to have numbers to show that they "followed" proper hiring procedure.
--- Recruitment agencies, I've not a good word to say about them. Most of the jobs they promote, they get from online postings on Monster/careerbuilder etc... It's actually rare that a recruiter will be contacted by an employer in my experience. When I asked recruiters if they are attempting to fill the position on behalf of the employer, they would try to wriggle out of the question, with even more bull!
--- The Mass DET is of no help. They basically tell you to do what i do, network with family and friends, and check online.
I've got a few leads at the moment, all were from referrals from friends of friends who know that jobs are in the pipeline with companies or someone has left to fill a new position at another company etc...
It's extremely discouraging, day after day for the past few months, some light at the end of the tunnel, but not with job boards or recruiters.
I've gotten like hundreds of SPAM emails from the email address I used on job boards in the few short months (throwaway emails are good!). Most calls I've taken, apart from one, from being part of the online boards scene were recruiters saying that I was the perfect candidate for a position they had etc... You know the score from then on!
YES, the job market is very tough out there, I can testify to that personally. But it would be not half as bad, searching for jobs online, IF the actual jobs existed. I had one phone call from an employer, who just wanted to feel me out as to who was out there in the job scene, when I asked if there was a job offering, he eventually said that we was "doing some research" and hung up. I've had more than one of theses types of calls in the past few weeks.
I know of people who have gone from Corp A to Corp B, Corp A needs to fill their position so someone from Corp C fills that position, then Corp C needs to fill theirs, and on and on. It's a vicious circle, looking in from the outside, hard to break in.
Job boards are a bunch of hype, from my own experiences in the past few months.
I used to work for one of the job boards listed here. Worked there for 4+ years during the height of the dot com boom. My last days were at the end of the boom.
I heard from many of the recruiters that dealt with toward the end of the dot com boom that they received so many resumes by email thru all of the job boards that all they used to do is look for people they knew. Having access the resumes myself, I could see that some of these companies received 100+ resumes a day. No recruiter is going to sift thru that many resumes. Some of the other products that look for keywords, etc are useless too.
Set yourself apart from others, fax or snail mail your resume.
Some job postings dont give any clue as to the person or company whos job is listed, but with a little time and effort, you can find it.
Snipes out jobs.
I agree that the better choice of the two would be a headhunter that found you. However, I would add one more thing: it's worth 10 minutes of your time to research who you're dealing with.
Don't let someone get you excited about a great position, and a great company, only to discover (perhaps in hindsight) that the 'headhunter' was neither experienced at their craft, nor interested in finding a good fit for the company or you. In those instances, the headhunter becomes more like a matchmaking aunt who just wants to marry off as many of her nephews as quickly as possible, make a few bucks, then move on to new town.
Fortuneately, until the job market improves back to where it was during the dot com era, this breed of 'budget headhunters' has died off or found work doing something else. But when the economy cycles back to where it's a job-hunter's market again, they will probably return with a great deal for you.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Also good are focused sites: Gamasutra for game jobs, Bio-Jobs for biotech.
I got a ton of interviews and eventually a job through the former, my girlfriend got one with the latter.
I know employers whom have posted jobs on monster, and they get such a crap flood of responses your resume is almost guarnteed to get lost in the mess. Even if it is good, the number of applicants they get is just overwhelming. I know of a local position that posted on monster and got 300 applicants in a short period of time. This dwarfs all the other applications they had gotten before that.
My favorite way to get a job is still good old fashioned networking. Many people in the IT industry are... non-sociable to say the least (by that I don't mean they hide in their rooms all day, but a lot of them are elitists etc. etc.). So if your out there meeting and greeting you've got a huge competitive edge.
If we lower our salary requirement as we are looking for our job, then there will no more offshore outsourcing.
So it is the choice whether you want to be an Indian or not?
so the most employable people have jobs.
the people who post on monster et al are are already the people who will have a harder time being employed.
As an employer, this vicious circle means that monster etc is not a career finding move since you have guilt by association.
For future reference.. It's spelled "Philippines" Two pees, one el.
jobserve.com is really good. I've got loads of work through them. All the jobs seem to be real, people actually ring back (my record is 30 seconds after I hit the submit button), the search facility is really good, etc. The best bit is that they don't allow your CV/Resume to be read by random agencies, so you don't get cold callers asking if you want to work in Belgium when your CV/Resume clearly states the south-east of England...unlike some other sites...
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
I'm in NYC. Here Craigs List is a nightmare for job listing. While the concept of Craigs List is great, a lot of people use it for finding any sucker with Design, PHP, MySql, Photoshop, Brain Surgery Certification skills combined with a willingness to answer phones and do general office tasks like staple your fingers together. That or someone needs to you desperately come by with your digital camera and a sponge to take pictures of their cat while fixing their PC. The subjects read: quick job, easy, pays $10. Really no joke. Its aweful.
I took a look around the SF craigs list a few times, and the job postings there are much more respectful. Employers list their names, the skill requirements are reasonable, and benefits and the usual are mentioned. In NYC you might find two of these for every 25 of garbage. Hoepfully over time and with a little economy improvement this crap will get winnowed away from the NYC site as people learn to take out their own trash. But hey - I'm not frustrated with online job searching.
Really, best deal is personal relationships and there are some good headhunters. You just have to learn to tell the difference between em.
How many of you guys got a job via a temp. agency? All of the Job Websites didn't do a damn thing for me. The one job that I did get was already whored out to a temp. agency so I had to technically get hired through the agency before I could a get a job. Many of my friends are getting screwed and can only find jobs through a similar manner but I don't know if this is generally occurring or just an odd coincidence as it seems like the only entry level positions left have been turned into temp jobs.
When I'm not feeling depressed enough or cynical enough, I like to use job boards to remedy that. 'Cause it's always reassuring to know that there are companies out there who need programmers with 30 years of e-commerce experience using C#.
Unless you live in india. Then, may I suggest monsterphilipines.com?
Unless you live in the Philippines and are a doctor, and then you're back to monster.com for US nursing positions.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
A friend of mine came out to LA, and started job hunting, including through the job sites.
Her skills are in network and windows administration, with plenty of training and experience in high end phone systems (like enterprise sized Nortel stuff).
The first call she got was from Belkin, being an independant sales rep, only making commissions.
The second was from a major national insurance company, who asked her to come out for an interview. She verified that it was a computer job before she went. The interview itself was an hour outside of LA. We drove out, and they asked if I was interested in sitting in on the meeting too. Why? I'm not looking for a job. So, I go to the car, and start playing with my laptop. 10 minutes later, she comes out bitching. It's a multi-level marketing thing, where they had a room full of unemployed non-english speaking people to sell insurance (or ideally recruit new sales people) to people that can't afford it, and take the commissions.
WTF? computer job? Nowhere in that job required a computer. It required being able to con people into spending money they couldn't afford on life insurance they'd never see. You didn't even use a computer to file the applications, they were by paper.
{sigh}
Aparently they went throught Monster.com, took down all the names and titles, and contacted everyone they could, offering jobs in their field, only to find that it was this sales crap.
Computer Job != Insurance Salesman
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Actually, I have a very high opinion of job sites. There are some I have been registered with for years without getting any offers, but others have gotten me tens of offers in a month, which I think is pretty good for a programmer/webmaster/sysadmin with little professional experience. I even have an explanation for the sites that I don't receive offers from. Rather than not good enough, I would assume they work too well. Companies looking for qualified people find many results and pick the best ones - which I may just not be among.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Regardless of whether the author of the article has his own agenda (boosting business for recruiters) or not, the current crop of job boards are really not designed very well.
One thing that is mentioned is the fact that employers get listings of people sorted by date, most recently updated first. And sure, that could be that way because the job boards are trying to drive traffic, rather than actually match jobs with people (and sell advertising, which many of them do ... more on that later). If candidates were listed in order of best match, it would serve the employer and the candidates better. But I'm not sure they can effectively do any decent matching.
These job boards seem to confuse business industry category (e.g. banking, auto manufacturing, software maker, internet provider) with job roles (accountant, lawyer, programmer, engineer, network administrator, secretary, janitor). If I pick the "internet hosting" category (most don't even get that detailed; the best you can do in many is "information technology" or "telecom") I end up seeing lots of jobs for Java Servlet programmers when what I really want might be a Network Administrator position. They also get job skills mixed up with job roles. There's lots of crossover between many job categories in terms of skills (a system administrator with programming skills in certain languages has an advantage in systsmes administrator, but might not want a job as a programmer, though would get matched with them because of that skill).
At a minimum, every job board should allow a candidate to specify each of the following:
Then for a job search to be done, or a position being posted, the employer would provide:
There are other things to add to this that would be optional, such as expected and probable pay level, previous job history (roles and business categories), etc. I believe searches would be far more effective if more aspects of matching, such as the above, were provided for. But it certainly seems to be the case that the job boards are more interested in driving higher numbers of page views.
Unfortunately, too many boards do search based strictly on keyword matching. I've actually gotten a match when I searched with "linux" as a keyword with a job that said "we are not running Linux here".
The current job boards are also turn offs to both employers as well as candidates. Employers generally have to pay for each posting, or monthly quota of posting, or a subscription. Small businesses will generally not be there, and larger businesses won't put all their jobs there (their own corporate web site is cheaper for them to post on). Job boards should really be free to employers, as well as candidates.
I don't know how bad it is for the employers, but candidates generally have to endure not only a regular flow of spam, but in many cases annoying things like pop-up ads, web bugs, and interstitial pages you have to select "no thanks" and click on as you go through each search or login.
I'd rather have Google style text ads (yes, I do sometimes click on them) support the site. And since ads are really about impressions, they should not be paid on a click through basis (if I am interested in what the ad offers, I usually go visit the sit
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
We've tried posting to these boards in the past.
Problem was, we posted a senior level position, and got a few good applicants. Unfortunately, we got such a flood of wannabees, no experience, way underqualified, I can't believe you even applied for this job types, that it took nearly 3 months to weed through all the resumes.
By the time we could do interviews, the few good ones had already found jobs.
As such, we won't be posting ANY jobs on these again soon.
Congratulations to everyone who needed an entry level job, cause they definitely cured us of posting them.
I don't think that IT employers hire anyone at all. But then again I'm just your average disgruntled programmer.
I found my first US job through monster in 24 hours after I filed my resume with them. I guess it works for other people, too.
I am a softmore in a junior college. A couple guys got together, and we made a job website just for our college. We are mainly trying to get job postings from local emplorers, as well as getting the college students signed up. This we made a free service, and is very easy to use. take a look, and I would like to know what slashdoters think about this kinda of site, and how it operates. http://www.findtechjobs.org please feel free to e-mail
When I look at hotjobs, I see Raytheon has posted another 100 jobs again today. Funny thing is, Raytheon isn't hiring. Another funny thing is, Raytheon is still looking for a "NT Systems Admin" that job has posted several times every week for years - and I can assure you that here in Denver there are - at least - a few hundred unemployed people who are easily qualified for that job.
Qwest does the same thing. There are also hundreds of jobs from the U.S. Navy.
Qwest, Raytheon, and the U.S. Navy account for about 80% of the jobs posted. The rest are from those recruiting companies.
Point is: I strongly suspect that 9 out 10 jobs posted are not for real. These people are just collecting resumes "just in case."
I don't know how this cr@p works, but it's obvious that it's a joke.
This article is a well, duh. A job board is a cattle call. They are used to get a large number of candidates quickly. In most cases, only 10 resumes out of 75 get more than a cursory look and the criteria for getting looked at isn't usually quality. It is relationship. No one buys from someone they don't trust. An employer is buying your services so they have to trust you. Most people that come from job boards don't do anything to create trust.
Here are a few ways establish trust:
- Get referred by a credible third party (often a good headhunter fits this). Have the referrer make a call to get you an interview "Hi Bill, I saw you are looking for _____. Have you talked to _____? No... Well, you need to"
- Don't overhype yourself on your resume. Just look good, use some color (it is 2004) and try to keep it to two pages.
- Your cover letter should speak to what the employer is looking for. Do your knowledge so you already know what the company does.
- REFERENCES REFERENCES REFERENCES. Have them. Name names. Put them in your resume.
- Follow up and follow up, but don't be desperate.
- Be on time and accurate. Have your schedule and facts straight.
-- $G
I do most of the hiring for a small internet entertainment company in Montreal. In the past few years we've advertised job vacancies (mainly programers and graphic designers) about a dozen times in our local newspaper and online (mainly Monster). We usually get around 20-30 resumes from a newspaper ad and around 200-300 from job boards.
For most of the positions we've ended up hiring people who saw our ad online. In our experience the most qualified responses come from the job boards. However, we've also noticed that the least qualified responses also come from the job boards. Of the 200-300 responses we'll get from an ad, may 30 of them are worth considering. The rest are pure garbage.
When I have a stack of 200-300 resumes to go through initially I'm looking for any excuse I can come up with to thin the pile. Speaking as someone who's read a lot of resumes here are the things that irk me the most...
1. Language - Even though we're located in Montreal which is in a predominantly French city our ads are always posted in English. Atleast a third of resumes will come in French. A few always come in other languages such as Spanish or Polish. To me that displays either laziness arrogance or cluelessness. None of which score any points for the applicant. If they can't be bothered to send me a response in the language of the advert, I can't be bothered to read it. These resumes are generally relegated to the circular file.
2. Distance - Even if our ad is for an entry level position in Montreal, we still get a large number of responses from people who either want to telecommute or relocate to take the job. We get people apply from as far away as Africa or Asia (and rarely Europe). Some of these people will even want us to sponsor their immigration to Canada. We might go to the trouble to do that for someone with unique talents but not for an entry level programmer. These resumes also get sent to the circluar file.
3. Vastly Overqualified - Whenever we post an opening for an entry level programmer we'll get 5-10 responses from people who are so vastly over qualified that there's little chance they'd be happy here (and stay with us long term). People who were professors or who have PHDs are not good matches for entry level positions.
4. Totally Wrong Careers - We get a fair number of resumes from people who seem like good candidates except for the totally wrong career. For example we had one guy apply who had been a chef for 15+/- years. He'd attended several prestigeous culinary schools and had worked at some rather well regarded restaurants. But now he wanted to give programming a shot.
5. Egregious Resumes / Cover Letters - When you apply for a job you should make some effort to "put your best foot forward". A surprising number of people don't. These run the gamut from simply bad spelling and grammar to people who send us resumes and cover letters for different companies and positions. Then there are the resumes with obviously bullshit "objectives". I mean things like "To synergize new ideas outside the box and take my employer to the next level of ebusiness". There also was the guy who had a resume to be a mechanical engineer (or something similiar I forget exactly) who had replaced the words "mechanical engineer" with "database admin" most places in his resume. Not everywhere mind you, just most.
6. Stalkers - If you send your resume and you don't hear back from me, its fine to send one follow up email. However don't start calling, faxing, and emailing on a daily basis to make sure I read your resume. Rest assured if you do
that I will read your resume but there's no chance you'll get hired. Same goes for post interview follow ups. Feel free to call me once. If I want to talk to you, I'll call you. If I don't call there's a reason.
7. Upon Request - Every time we post a job opening, we include what we want you to send us when you apply. References, portfolio, etc. It never fails that people send us resumes that say "Portfolio available upon request". Are they stupid? Did they not read the ad? I've got 200 resumes to go through am I going to take the extra time to request portfolio individually? Certainly not.
I found more jobs by going to company web site and apply it direct.
Monster is ineffective if your use of Monster sounds like the following:
1. Enter your resume, and then enter it again but using Monster's input boxes.
2. Search for a type of job or skill and find a list of jobs.
3. Come across an interesting-sounding job.
4. Press "Apply Now".
5. Wait for manna to fall from heaven.
However, these job boards are not without merit, but only as a means to see jobs, not as a means to apply to them.
Those who truly want a job will go the extra step of sending a personal email, with a custom cover letter, and possibly a tuned or custom resume. This method will be more effective than simply using the stock Apply Now method -- which employers now apparently routinely ignore.
Both of my jobs attained over the last two years have been gained via this method, since IT recruiting (my previous boom-time sure-fire method) fell through in early 2002.
(As a hiring manager at a small company, I'm finding it astonishing at how many people apply for positions with no cover letter, and nothing stating why they want or think they would do well in the position! I don't consider those applicants terribly seriously, because they clearly don't consider the position very seriously.)
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
So why am I getting these single-posting results every other time I get agent emails? I asked Monster. Repeatedly. Finally they told me I was getting these because they match keyword searches specified in my agents, and they told me they allow work-at-home listings that meet their standards: a money-back guarantee, mention of their fee in the listing, and contact info.
Forgetting for a moment that the majority of the work-at-home listings (they're almost all herbalife, BTW) don't meet these requirements, the ones I get as email ads do. Mention of fee: check. Money-back guarantee: check. Contact info: check.
Still, why do I get these all by themselves? This one company (homecs.com--Home Career Search) apparently gets preferrential treatment.
This is what monster.com has become. A tool of the work-at-home hucksters.
Amy
My personal contacts failed me but Monster and Dice are working quite well. I have a couple of companies I am interviewing with now that came from Dice and Monster. They're contracts but when your layed off, a job is a job.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
I've been using careerbuilder.com for a few months, and not gotten a peep out of any of the places I've submitted to, but it's always possible they just don't like me or my introduction for some reason... I do like the automatic notices of jobs matching some criteria...
What do you do if your network of personal contacts don't have jobs either? A couple of nights ago one of the guys I hang out with joked that nobody in this town actually works -- they're either unemployed actors, unemployed singers, writers, dancers, etc. (Guess where I live? ;-) Unfortunately there is some truth to that statement: out of the 6 guys in our group that night, only one of us had a job, and his company was just hanging by a thread.
In fact, she spends countless hours scrolling through many, many resumes. My sense from watching her is that, if you want to post your resume online, and get it looked at, you need to make it sharp, focused, and easy to scan quickly. Get appropriate keywords on there. Give details where they matter, but don't drown the reader with verbage.
Just my sense of things. Your mileage may vary.
By the way, she does not "blanket-bomb" her client companies with resumes. She tries to provide a service, which partly involves doing the pre-screening for them. At the start of a new job, she might run a wide range of resumes past the hiring manager, to get a sense of who and what the company is looking for. But in general she treats the number of resumes she sends over before making a hire, to be a measure of her skill.
Again, your mileage with other recruiters may vary.
Nick has a good system as to how to get a job. It works, and makes a lot fo sense. Read the book.
I hate monster. If a position we have opening shows up on there, that means instead of about 20-30 people interested in the job, I get info from everyone within 500 miles, or who wants to live in this part of the country who has seen a computer before and can spell one of the words in the posting.
Kinda a pain. I don't think any of our successful hires have been from monster.com applicants. Many times they don't make the initial screening and mostly the others fall out during a phone screening.
MySQL? Color me interested.
phil_at_gravityhammerANTISPAM_dot_com
I had my resume posted on Monster for a couple of years. Eventually I got the job I'm in now, not because I replied to a job post but they actually searched out my resume.
I was shocked that this company even used Monster... I have no plans of actively seeking positions through this service but it seems to have done me well, even if it took a couple of years.
One of the problems is that alot of companies are required by internal policy to post job openings, while they fully intend to hire bob from marketing's nephew.
I've felt fully qualified for a jobs in the past and not even gotten an interview. It really is the luck of the draw. Who you know and all that.
I am in management at a tech company and I have tried both Hotjobs and Monster for hiring purposes in the Bay Area. Neither produces results anywhere close to as good as a site called Craigslist that costs 1/4 as much. It is a decidedly low tech option, but we get 5 to 6 times the number of applicants from Craigslist and they are local to our area.
The future of this market may be to really nail the local markets instead of trying to blanket the world. I do not want to hire somebody for my position who lives in Phoenix even if they are the most qualified person out there.
Based on the number of applications, it is easier for someone on the other side of the table to search a local market as well. Good for both sides and it saves me about $250.00 per posting.
A lot of people around here have been getting decent results from the temp
work services. Seems that some of the employers in the area don't hire
anyone directly anymore; they get temps, and if they like one, then they
offer them a full-time position after a couple of months.
It also seems that people who mail resumes aren't as likely to get a job
as people who hand-deliver them.
As for internet job boards, I never imagined anyone would take them very
seriously, until I started getting a lot of questions from users about them.
It seems a lot of people are under the impression that if they submit their
resume someplace on line, a job will magically find them. Huh? Who wants
to hire someone so lazy that they don't even want to apply for individual
jobs, but just wait for their ship to come in?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I started job hunting about three weeks ago using networking, resume/job search sites and headhunter contacts.
I've gotten 1 qualified lead through networking (and my network is pretty large), 0 qualified leads through existing headhunter contacts and about 10 qualified leads through resume/job search sites.
(qualified lead == interview)
The leads through resume/job search sites are either headhunters or inhouse recruiters contacting me after they've seen my resume online or me contact a company whose job listing I saw on the site.
Those figures are not counting the dozens of unqualified leads produced by keyword monkeys (oh, you've done Perl 10 years ago, let me ask you if you'd like to do a Perl project in Outer Mongolia for $5 / hr). I do still think most headhunters only slightly higher on the evolutionary ladder than earth worms. Under no circumstance ever think they're your friends...they're not although they will always try to convince you they are.
I think rather than concentrating on which job search tactic is better, job hunters should use ALL of them to maximize the amount of good job leads you get.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I'm a Perl geek, and I've had the most luck with postings to the perl-jobs mailing list (http://jobs.perl.org/), and networking through the local perl-mongers chapter. The large sites are pretty much worthless.
Mr. Corcodilos:
I doubt I'm going to get a reply, but I'll reply anyway.
Some people sometimes find jobs via Monster, et al. But the only credible studies that have been done suggest that the boards are a lousy way to find or fill a job.
This is the kind of logic that works in any industry. No one reads statistics, everyone reads expert ratings and listens to the commentary of friends. The availability heuristic is much more important to consumers than are actual statistics - something you seem to be intimately familiar with.
Being as this is the case: People listen to their friends about jobs, the boards operate by filling some of their customers with jobs and having those people tell friends about it. Just as you've pointed out that managers hire people with personal credibility and expert advice [30k to fill 100k job] first, people choose services based on personal credibility and expert advice first. Here's my question: What makes you think you can change that?
I mean, lets face it. Your post doesn't really make me want to go read your website [and, to be fair, I haven't]. It's intelligent, but it's the same kind of thing: ''I'm an expert, and being an expert, I shall loosely cite a few other "expert" sources which convince you I'm right, and then I shall give you expert advice: Don't trust big websites, trust me.''
My point is this: What advice can you offer than transcends that other other "experts" in the field? Why are you more qualified to offer advice? 9 years of personal testimonials are still personal testimonials, go read alexchiu.com for a brief survey of testimonial science.
Really, I'm genuinely curious. "Expert" referent power has always interested me. Please don't take this as angry sarcasm.
From what I have found, once you find a suitable job simultaneously at least 100 other people have too. So essentially your application/resume/begging gets tossed in a big bin with hundreds of other applicants.
Do you really think that line level HR do-bees are going to read through them all? They probably take the first 10 and forward the top 5.
So anyways, there are just too many IT people without jobs these days. Thank you, Dubya! Can I hitch a plane ride on Airforce one to the next NASCAR race too? I'll help pay! Hey, wait a minute! I pay taxes! I already *DID* pay!!!
Maybe job sites would work if it we did away with outsourcing. Hey Bush why dont you drop a Nuke on India and that would do somthing about all these call centers in India. Probably would get you re-elected too at this rate no-one on slashdot will vote for you
I used to work for a medium-sized job board. True Fact: something like 80% of job listings are actually fakes posted by headhunters "harvesting" resumes. These guys like to boast that they have "100,000" resumes or whatever - it's part of their cold-call pitch. So their goal was just to collect as many resumes as possible. Our dot-com was in the headhunter business too, so I got to see both sides of the equation.
.NET...") "Cast a wide net." Makes you wonder about the validity of those "language popularity surveys" that are based on job board listings...
Incidentally, that's why most of the listings have bizzare combinations of tech skills and languages ("Seeking Certified Oracle DBA with 6+ yrs Java, Perl, C++, UNIX, PHP,
The only love I ever got through a headhunter.net posting was about five invitations to interviews from various members of a financial planning company with corporate ties to a red umbrella. I spoke to one on the telephone and told him that I was very specifically interested in doing IT stuff -- desktop support, etc. with an intended career goal of systems administrator. He assured me they were hiring all kinds of people.
Then I actually went to this company's site and saw the magic acronym in their press section -- MLM. That was what made me realize that this guy, and the other four-odd guys also looking to get in touch with me, were just looking for warm bodies for their downline. And they all found me from headhunter.net.
I imagine that headhunter.net is not alone in this phenomenon, and I don't doubt that other people have found fine jobs like TopShelf. I'm just saying, use a disposable address in general, but there for sure.
I hate to reiterate a commonly made point, but pretty much all the jobs I've had, worth having for a long time, came to me through friends or acquaintances. One or two I found on my own through obsessive research but later found out I got the job because a mutual friend gave me a thumbsup.
"There are some people who, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em." - Louie Armstrong
One quote I found really interesting:
Hiring managers were asked what recruiting tool they found most effective. Echoing the job hunters of the previous year, managers said that "word of mouth referrals" were the best source of hires (62%). Meanwhile, the HR folks -- the people who buy online job ads -- said such personal contacts were the worst recruiting tool. So, who's right?
One of the job hints that one frequently sees is "try to bypass HR and go directly to who is in charge of the department where the position you want is" It seems that HR frequently is seen by managers and employees as a roadblock for hiring the best employees.
It seems true - and in my experience, interviews by people who are in the department where you would work are generally more comfortable, and more likely to ask you questions that seem relevant rather than "if you were an animal what type would you be" questions.
I work at a college where I used to be a student. I know that when another student was hired, his manager had to argue for his hiring, and was accused by HR of "trying to create a position for him" - despite the fact that he was filling a position for someone who had retired - and been working as a contractor in the postion for several months.
Dave Barry once parodied the old "avoid HR" job hunting quote by saying HR never wants to hire anyone because they just know they will be employees who never fill out their healthcare forms right
This all does make me wonder about the disconnect between how HR percieves itself compared to the negative light it seems to be seen in by employees, potential employees, and managers of other departments.
I have blog like everyone else
I never got a response on either any service. Maybe it was the job market, but after responding to the first local wanted ad I had a job.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
monsters.com is still in business?
what is this... 1999?
next I'll hear that webvan.com and pets.com are still around. they're not right?
more seriously: I've gotten interviews from DICE and people do say (as they have in these comments) that craigslist is good. The best thing besides contacts, which will always rule, is diligence with a particular company. Even if they act like they are sick of hearing from you every couple months, companies do like to know you really like them IN PARTICULAR... and the nice thing is you end up working for a company you like in particular.... albeit a year later...
If you have a few years experience jr more then you need to use those contacts without shame, but in that case you already know this.
-pyrrho
You base the effectiveness of these companies based on the percentage of all jobs filled that are filled by these services.
What you fail to take into account is the relative number of positions being offered in the different services.
For instance, if only 5% of all jobs offered are listed on Monster, 3.5% or whatever would be fantastic.
You also fail to address the fact that the services are more useful in certain industries, and almost completely useless in most industries. For instance, most fast food jobs are filled by word of mouth. So? That doesn't help Lockheed Martin find talented engineers.
Lastly, you fail to address the statistical validity of the surveys you quote, as well as there real implications. Your logic is backward.
And the worst part is, you fail to remind the readers that your interests lie orthogonal to those of the job services.
You over-reduce the effectiveness of job sites by relying on weak numbers, something most would call a sterotypically poor editorial process.
It creates an amazing display of irony.
Face it, like everything in a capitalist society, effectiveness of job sites can only be measured in terms of the value placed on them by job hunters and employers.
Let me just cut through the bullshit for everybody:
Headhunters are middlemen. Job sites are an attempt at removing the middleman, allowing companies to ultimately get better candidates cheaper. Likewise, candidates get better and easier access to jobs.
But then they became over run by resume collectors and so I moved on to smaller sites.
It semed to me that sites like monster et al were useful, until they became over run by recuiters vs end employeers... I guess the recuiters paid better than the others.
I used to date a headhunter, and she was a very nice girl. I don't know why everyone says such nasty things about them.
They're constantly trying to talk you down on salary.
I dealt with one of those outfits back in 2001. First of all, the guy I talked to originally disappeared within a few weeks. One of the signs that you are talking to a body shop/resume warehouse is that the turnover of their "recruiting" staff is high. The second guy I talked to did manage to get me a real interview with an actual company that had a job available. Cool. Of course, after pressing when he tried to talk me down on salary requirements, I got him to admit that he had never personally placed anyone in my salary range. He was used to working $10-20K lower.
Remember, the wolves at those body shops get hungrier when the commissions start drying up. The reason they are trying to talk you down on salary is that they want to place you quickly. They aren't in it to find you the perfect job. In fact, they don't care whether they ever find you a job. They get their cut from the employers. The faster they can put a warm body in that seat, the faster they get paid.
The ones that are worth dealing with are the ones who would like to earn a commission off of you every few years for the next decade or two. I know a handful of them. I like them, trust them and call them first when I'm looking. You have to understand them. Don't be a pest, don't waste their time. Refer a couple of excellent people to them. Do a good job when they place you. If you can throw a contract their way when your employer is looking for more people, do it. It's all about the ones who want to have long term relationships with employers and employees. They survive when others don't because there are people who trust them and will take the time to talk to them.
I've concluded that some companies advertise job openings so that they can point out to investers and customers that they are growing. Don't worry about buying from us, we are doing just fine even in this downturn. See, we even have openings.
1. Postings are usually wayy to specific. HR staff making the job postings list out the requirements/qualifications ad nauseum. While there may be a very small fraction of people in the world with that exact experience, most will not. And there is probably a very large number of people who would be highly qualified for the position yet who do not satisfy all the requirements ad nauseum. -- interlude -- I guess this points to a bigger problem - if not THE biggest problem: the people making the postings. People making the postings tend to err in one of two ways: either they try to hire people who are not appropriate for the position - either because that is not what the job candidate is seeking or because what the employers seeks is not what the candidate offers. In this case the HR person is wasting the time of candidates and the companies by failing to match candates to positions and failing to screen them. -- Interlude 2 -- This highlights another problem - the inability of HR staff to even be able to match or screen people for positions. Add to this the fact that the HR person is motivated often by a commission or some other bullshit and it only compounds the problem --Back to Interlude 1-- The other side of the coin is overscreening. Listing out job specs and qualifications in excruciating detail. More often this is going to be a huge turnoff for prospective candidates. For one thing, it makes the company come off immediately as exceedingly anal/stuffy/corporate/inflexible. When facing a choice between a job at Megacorp with all of its excruciating criteria, or at some small Internet startup that "...is looking for enthusiastic, bright, team players, willing to grow..." etc. etc. the latter has vastly more appeal. But the former is only going to tend to attract some geeky corporate thud-types. I see this OVER AND OVER AND OVER in postings for larger companies. Then, compounding the problem is that the HR departments at these large companies are virtually indistiguishable from headhunters. Well that's a huge turnoff. Headhunters are a huge turnoff. Incorporating them and/or their techniques into an HR department is a sign of a company that is operating in the WRONG DIRECTION, which is another big turnoff. Finally, a lot of these job boards are simply fronts for headhunters. The fact that this is not fully disclosed is an abuse of the job seekers and dishonest. It is also dishonest because the site masquerades as a truly open job board but if it is controlled by one group of headhunters it is certainly not open to all employers in an equal fashion. It masquerades as that but it is not. Its a shame that the government doesn't get more involved. But then, can we count on them for something like that? Perhaps a government-sponsored job agency is a tad too socialistic for the current group of incompetent oligarchs? But that is what they should do. Most states do have employment agencies and now even have web sites. Some are starting to look pretty decent in fact. Some are just an excuse to get on welfare. One problem is that the state-based employment agency model was good in the past, but now having a federal one would be much better. Since the federal government isn't good at much other than ripping off people and creating wars, maybe the states should start linking their sites together.
I think I speak for nearly everyone in saying that online job search tools are useless. They haven't gotten me anywhere.
However, if you are trying to find contract or out of state perm work, monster, hotjobs, etc work well. I usually quote an overly high rate to start with and work from there. I am testing the waters for some short term consulting and it doesn't seem to be too bad compared to the late mid to late eightees. You will need to follow about ten leads before a placement. But what you'll find is that for all the failed interviews, you will still see the same employer looking up to a year later.
Try talking to the headhunters when you are called back for a position that turned you down about a year ago. They are as frustrated as we are with waste of time interviews/leads. However, for a large search area, I have gotten a several offers in the last few months. Some rates were too low to consider but you need to find a desperate employer in this environment to get a good rate. Keep looking even if you find employment in the mean time.
Hang in there and use every resource at your disposal.
I'm president of a small technology support company. In December, we needed to hire a "network engineer". We paid, handsomely, to post on Monster, and within a month we got 1,100+ resumes. My partner and I read through every single one. As of last week, we'd hired two people (business got better), both from the Monster posting.
Bottom line: we hired from Monster. Yes, we pay more attention to referrals from friends/employees, but the key issue is timeliness. At the time we wanted to hired, we didn't have any "personal referrals".
Another thought: the resumes of the folks we hired were neither the first nor the last submitted. Instead, they were clear, honest, and enthusiastic.
Monster (and other boards) may not be the best way to look for a job, but they're far from worthless.
Please explain how the parent posting is a troll?
Seriously, post to the JobCenter journal.
I used to work for Careerpath, before it was bought by Careerbuilder. I wasn't just an employee, I was at the executive level.
The interesting thing is, we had instant and direct access to the entire database. But where did we go to find new employees? The headhunters. Why? Because the databases are chock full of crap. Finding a good, matching resume in the midsts of all that noise was a problem that we literally spent tens of millions of dollars trying to solve.
It was far easier to pay a headhunter.
The jobs were a lot of junk too. Most of them were filler streamed in from the newspapers and kept on file for months, just to bulk-up the database for marketing purposes.
That was all 5 years ago though. I'm sure things are different now. I quit, found a new job via a headhunter (actually a network of them that I collected while working at CareerPath) then got laid off a few months later in the dot-com meltdown, and never did find another job.
I ended up creating my own job for myself. Got my own little educational product company now. The most effective way I've found to get employees- newspaper ads. Really.
The on-line job boards have all been a waste of time to me.
To start with I am one of many that have been looking for a job for a while now. (any one need a very good network architect/admin/security/firewall person with management/director experience?)
So far I have found the job boards to be a massive time sink. I spend many hours a day going through several boards looking for jobs that match my skill set and applying to several each day. This gets even more time consuming when the job board simply passes you through to the company or recruiters web site where they want you to fill out a resume in thier database instead of using the one from the job board.
Then there are all the jobs posted that don't bother to list the rate they are willing to pay. You finally get a call from a HR person and they tell you the job pays 15 dollars an hour. With the description requiring 15 years experience with every known piece of hardware and protocol in existence and asking that you have all possible certifications.
Or seeing dozens of jobs posted on the boards by Lockheed Martin that I can do in my sleep but never get a response no matter how many times I have applied. And those that require a current top secret clearance. Believe you have to havae a job that requires a clearance before you can get one and if you leave that job the clearance laps fairly quickly. So these jobs don't apply to those out of work, only those looking to change jobs.
And do any of these companies really keep resumes on file and search them? Did they even look at any of the submissions the first time? Or did they already have the candidate identified and were fullfilling some company policy to post the ad some where for so many days before filling the slot?
Some how I don't think they do.
I know the economy is in the dumper and that companies can take their pick from the millions of unemployed but this boarders on bait and switch or at the least making the employee want to find a different job as soon as possible.
As for the job boards themselves, I have found monster to be the worse for what looks like work at home/pyriamid/scam job listings. (big hint: any job that requires you to pay money up front to get it is NOT A JOB!)
I was recently talking to a recruiter that is still spouting the bit about updating your resume every day and rewriting your resume for each job. She even suggested sending your resume overnight to jobs you really wanted. Seems that this really gets the HR persons attention. I would kind of like to use a 2x4 personally.
Another thing I have noticed about the job boards is their continues hawking of services "guaranteed" to get your resume in front of hundreds if not thousands of hiring managers for only a few dollars. Kind of confirms that the job boards are not there to help job seekers or even the employers solve a related problem, they are there to generate a profit any way they can.
Seems to me that honestly listing your accomplishments and skills don't count for much anymore. Not cramming my resume full of meaningless buzz words and not playing thier game does hurt the search. But I suspect they get what they search for. People that talk the jargon but can't resolve a problem because the don't understand what they are doing.
Thanks for letting me rant.
"Very true. That's why you have to be your own "headhunter" in order to get a job."
My career in the sex industry is assured.
"Just keep working at it."
And hope that doesn't get outsourced.
Anyway I've been wondering why the out of work don't borrow a couple leaves from the advertising industry? Were's the commercials? The pop-ups? The cheesy gifts.
Don't make the mistake of staying local. Many of the people (most?) that are looking at employment websites are trying to find local companies that are hiring.
Just take a step back from your computer and think for a few seconds. Are you tied to a location (family, spouse, etc.?) If you have the ability to move, consider what kinds of cities (or towns) could use you best?
I was living in Boston, had went to school there, even got a fancy IT job when I graduated in '98. Really great times, but they stopped rolling by '02, and I found myself seriously struggling to make ends meet.
I worked freelance for about a year before all the work dried up, then I decided I'd be happier making less money if it was more steady. I looked in vain for work using online sites and classified ads before an opportunity presented itself to me. It's available to anyone, really.
For not terribly interesting reasons, my GF and I moved out to the middle of nowhere (Nebrasksa). I've never been to the midwest before. Never seen this much corn in all my life. I thought I'd drown in boredom. But you know what? It costs nothing to live here. You can get an apartment for a couple hundred bucks a month. Food is cheap and super-sized (hey, it's the heartland).
And I thought there'd be nothing for me here, jobs-wise. But my "big city" experience automagically placed my resume at the top of a lot of stacks of job applications. Most of the local talent has left the state, so there's a real need for skilled IT people. I got a job that's perfect, working for a nice, small office with a relaxed working environment, making more than enough to start saving again.
By Boston standards, I could just barely scrape by. I used to buy into the idea that "Places like San Francisco or New York are more expensive (housing, food, etc.) than Kansas City, Missouri because the jobs pay more." People, this is a myth.
Just ask around and you'll find that the salaries made in most of the Eastern Seaboard's cities is not substantially more than what you might find in the middle of Ohio (for example). But take cost of living into account, and the difference in lifestyle becomes readily apparent. You have to decide what's most important to you -- is it being surrounded by art and music and 3am pizza? Or is it being able to afford your rent, have some extra for cable TV and high-speed internet?
Make no doubt, if you've got 4 operas available to you any night of the week, if you've got the best pizza in the world at your doorstep, if you've got superstar artists living in lofts downtown -- You are paying for this. If you can't live without it, well, there's nothing I can say to convince you. I found that what was making me miserable (not being able to afford to live normal life comfortably) weighed more than what was making me happy (having a whole city at your fingertips).
But my point is this. If you're in the U.S., most of it is the same all over. I know, New York City is different than Tupulo, Mississippi, but the general day-to-day life of Americans is a xeroxed morass of sameness with the exception of a few of the larger cities. But lemme tell you, living in an apartment in SoHo sucks when you find all your income is going to cover your head and you're stuck at home on a Saturday night because you just can't afford $10 drinks at the bar.
Look for cheap places to live, then look in their regional newspaper's classified ads for jobs. Divide the starting salaries you see with the same newspaper's classified ads for apartments. There are many places in this country that have high ratios, you just have to decide what's got the better cost/benefit ratio. I can tell you, unless you're a doctor, lawyer or financial wunderkid, a lot of places don't make financial sense for someone just trying to start out in the world.
People are buying homes out here in their early twenties. I couldn't have dreamed of doing that in Boston or New York, not for a long time, anyway. The average rent in most of your bigger cities could get you a pretty big house in other parts of the country.
Don't ignore your state's job service or job service websites of states you'd be willing to move to -- while those sites are, admittedly, full of lower-level job listings than most slashdotters are interested in, there are still gems to be found there. I'm going to be starting work on Monday at a decently high quality job in my field that I found out about through a state Job Service site after months of using both Monster and personal networking. Before I hit that state job board I applied to about 30 jobs through Monster, some of which I was very well qualified for, and never heard anything back beyond the standard computer-generated thank you (if I even got that.) Personal networking netted me 3 interviews out of 4 positions I tried for, but unfortunately no job offers. (And for 2 of those jobs I interviewed for, I wasn't even necessarily what they needed -- I got in because of who I knew.) The only good Monster actually did me is it got a headhunter in touch with me about a job I already had learned about through networking.
From 1998-2001, the very day I activated my resume on Monster, I'd have 3-4 job offers rolling in. (usually somewhere I didn't want to go, but still)
I was never more than a week out of work, even if it was just contract stuff. And even without a degree, I made serious bank towards the end.
Fast forward to 2003, I've been in school for 18 months getting myself ready for med school, and I out of the blue realize that my resume on Monster has been active since my last layoff in 2001. My credentials, while not top of the line, were of a skill set that most major companies can use. (solaris, linux, windows admin, extensive security experience with firewalls, ids, and email servers, good network hardware skills, even knew my way around IOS well enough to handle a moderate sized network) Nothing for a year...not that I was looking.
Looking through it now, I often check science jobs for something to do in the summer. Here in Denver, there's a good amount of biotech and chemical companies, but I'll be damned if there's more than 3 postings a week on Monster in that category, which are usually just from headhunters anyway.
Perhaps THAT is some indication how many companies
actually use job boards. They're back to the old standards...headhunters, word of mouth, and the local paper.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
It amazes me that so many people with skills start their job search by looking for job openings.
I've used the same technique to get my last few jobs, and all were good and in my field:
Use the yellow pages.
1) Look for companies that do work in the field you're interested in, and find contact details
2) Call them all and find out who makes hiring decisions
3) Send resume with cover letter to that person, specifically comparing projects you've done with projects they've done if possible
4) Starting from best company to worst, go to the offices IN PERSON and talk to the decision maker. It's not an job interview, which means you're the only one they'll be talking to, but they're not the only one you're talking to. This means they're not in a position of authority over you, and you can command some respect from them.
5) Contact them again by phone the day after you've spoken to them to thank them and let them know that you're interested in working there, and call them back again to check up once you've covered every business in town.
You don't need to know anyone to use this technique, and the longest it's taken me to get a GOOD job this way is 2 months.
Bottom line is, ppl hate going through all the bullshit of advertising and interviewing. If you give them the opportunity to avoid doing so, they will take it.
Oh, and another good thing to do once you get a job is call every other person you spoke to and tell them thanks for speaking to you, but you're not looking any more. That will really make you stand out in their minds, and if they're still there next time you need a job, they'll remember you in a very positive way.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
When I was last unemployed a little less then a year ago, I took full advantage of Monster and Dice. The key to these sites is using them properly. As much as one would like to believe, these sites generally can't find you a job. However, and this is the important part, you can find a job on these sites. The key is using them like a glorified(sp?) classified ad. Most offers on these sites do not want you to use the "submit your resume now" feature on the site, but forward your resume to a seperate (and listed) e-mail address. It's also important to make sure you read the description, and avoid vague job descriptions, just as you would do with any other job offer from any other source. Using these rules, I pulled a 3:1 ratio of Resumes submitted vs. Interviews granted. I never won any of the job offers I submitted, mainly because I was applying for jobs that I was underqualified for, and attempted to use the 'I know I can do this job, trust me' interviewing technique. I ended up settling for a job that was easier and paid less then I desired, for the sole purpose of building the experience needed to get the jobs I missed out on before. I am currently retooling my resume, and next week will begin using Monster and Dice to look for a new job, and I have full faith that I will find what I want using these sites.
Just another piece of evidence that quality and success in business don't have to be related. Personally, I suspect that marketing is the dominant factor.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That the major job boards only serve to comply with regulations that jobs be posted publicly while the job is given internally or to Joe's cousin.
You can find jobs at job sites. My experience was when looking I found about 7 sites relevent to my city. Usually the local ones are best and the national ones not so good. Each board has its own character that you'll discover. Some have spiders that find job postings on company web sites, some include posts from the local papers, some are just head hunter spam.
I do hate very much all the spam headhunters put on the job boards but its manageable when you look at the company field first to see if something might be a real job. You'll learn all the local recruters soon enough and they post their adds in block so you'll see 7 CNC's in a row etc.
I'd love suggestions for free sites where I can post openings for a sysadmin (Linux, BSD) and a db admin (MySQL, PostgreSQL). I used to post job openings on Mojolin and gnujobs, but they don't quite seem to be working these days.
Right now, I'm mainly posting them on location-based (Munich) sites like http://www.munich-service.de/forum/index.html.
In order of actual effectiveness as per my experience in the last 2 years: (IT sector)
networking with associates
job boards
newspapers
cold calling companies
self employment / contract work through direct marketing
What I found absolutely useless:
headhunters/agents
Dont wate your time.
I had a recent job interview with a big electronics company, which name I shall not name (even though they make nice razors), which started off with an interview with HR.
Instead of a chance to show my technical knowledge, HR simply started firing off the usual nonsense and rejected me on non-technical grounds, before I even had a chance to get interviewed by a possible future colleague:
Competence should not be sought by the technical incompetent.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I was unemployed and looking for a job, and had posted on the job boards to no avail.
My sister happened to bring a copy of the chamber of commerce business directory which had listings of all the businesses thet are members along with phone and fax #'s.
I wrote a simple generic cover letter simply stating that I was new in the area and if that I was aware that most businesses only advertised as a last resort, asking that they contact me if interested in anyone with my skills or pass my info along if they knew anyone who might be.
Then I entered the fax #'s for the IT related companies, solution co's, isp's, web co's,... and also for the employment agency's. In all I faxed to about 170 #'s
Intrestingly enough not one of the employment agency's bothered to call back and I only got one call(the next day!), but that call led to good work of a varied nature for a company that truly values my skill set.
I've been on the job search for more than a month now, mostly using Internet and finding nothing or 'NO' answers. After a month I got bored and decided to barge in some companies directly, resumes in hand. I expected to be ignored most times but was surprised to be rushed into HRs offices for immediate interviews 2 times out of 3. Hope to start a new good job in a week or so.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I don't know where *you* live, but neither in Chicago, nor down here on the Space Coast of Florida, if there's one or two jobs in the Sunday paper, it's a good weekend. Tech jobs simply *aren't* posted, other than online.
mark "2.5 years and still looking"
First, I would like to point out that you shouldn't apply for just a job. You apply for a position within a company. If on monster I see xyz headhutersrus as the company, I don't apply, pretty simple. If I see a company I don't know, I will research them and see if they fit with the type of company I want to work for. Then its time to contact them directly if they pass. Secondly, if a company goes to a recruiting firm to find an employee. You may not have a choice but to deal with the headhunter. You have to be firm with them the first time you have contact. Find out if they actually have a position for you or if they are gathering warm bodies. Then make your choice wisely. Lastly, I have obtained my past 2 positions from Monster postings.(I have also obtained some 45,000 spam messages, possibly related to my resume posting on Monster)
Never had problems with them, placed my CV up on about 3 or 4 sites and within 2 weeks had a contract and I get called at least twice a week from recruiters with potential - and relevant - positions.
Only thing is the usual case where the recruiter hasnt a bloody clue about IT tech and hasn't bothered to read my CV properly, but thats no fault of the sites.
The only way you could possibly get pissy about these sites is if you're expecting them to magically get you a job, they're simply points of contact between you and companies and should be treated as such.
The last time I switched jobs was in 1999, and I found my current job through Monster. It was a job posting and I found it by a geographically limited keyword search. Surprisingly, though, I knew the first person to contact me after I applied, so personal networking would have found the position as well if I had called my friend.
The company went through a downturn over the last 2+ years (yeah, who didn't) where we shrunk significantly, but we are now hiring at a rapid clip. It's my responsibility to specify the skillsets and experience needed for our open positions, to interview the short-listed candidates, and ultimately to contribute my vote to the hire/no hire decision, which must be a unanimous vote of about 4 people.
We currently find candidates using three methods. By far the one we rely on most heavily, and the one that has been the most successful in finding qualified candidates that we eventually hire, is networking.
After networking, we turn to the job boards. The main reason we do this is that we have found that many headhunters send us resumes that they pulled from job boards, so why pay a headhunter a (hefty) fee for something we can do ourselves just as easily?
If we are still having difficulty filling a position after exhausting the first two methods, then we turn to a small group of headhunters and staff augmentation firms that we have existing contractual relationships with. We don't deal with firms that charge huge fees, and we don't work with firms that send you stacks of unscreened resumes.
So, at least in my case, I have found the job boards useful both as a job seeker and as a hiring manager.
There are many things you may want the candidate to send to you. But asking them to send references in advance is not one of them. No candidate for any job should ever send a list of references in advance. Instead, bring the references with you to the interview. References do not provide new information that helps the initial selection process. What references are good for is verifying that what the candidate said was (well, might be) true, and that they are (well, might be) of good character.
Also, in the existing legal climate, references generally won't be all that forthcoming, anyway. You know a candidate won't provide references they believe will be negative. The value added by references is not that much for anything besides corporate level executives, anyway. So, unless you are hiring a CEO or CFO, references won't even do you much good.
The problem with sending references is that there are some bad companies out there (and the candidates usually cannot sort this out very easily, because some of these bad companies are big corporations, and the often sleazy headhunters they do business with) end up using the references information inappropriately. I've been harrassed as a result of being listed as a reference by someone, and I've had to tell anyone who asks to use me as a reference to never give my name until after it at least it seems, during the interview, that the job is a good match. The best scenario is for the employer to ask the candidate at the end of the interview for the references as an indication that the candidate is being placed on the short list.
So if you were to ask for references to be sent with the resume, please expect that those people who value and respect the privacy of the people they are identifying as references will not do so immediately. Portfolios provided in advance are a good thing, and for people like graphical artists, that should be a standard way (short of intellectual property issues). But providing references in advance is completely inappropriate.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've had really good luck with dice.com. My last for jobs have been through dice. The most recent about six months ago. Recruiters/Headhunters are not all bad. They don't care about you, that is true. Regarding contract-to-hire jobs, I have found that many recruiters want to get you hired at the highest hourly wage so their cut goes up. That is good for you and the recruiter.
The company I work for sells a resume/job tracking database software called PCRecruiter, which has it's own integrated job board system. I can tell you for sure that while a lot of companies are still posting jobs on Monster and Careerbuilder, et al, more and more are starting to get into hosting their very own job board systems, or are grouping with other companies in their industry to host a smaller local board. Sure, it'll mean that job seekers have a less centralized place to do their hunting, but it also means that the people applying to the jobs you have open will be much more likely the ones you were looking for in the first place...
Recently I have had to use these job boards: I find that although the specific positions are not always of interest, I am able to spot a couple of agencies that advertise jobs of the "right style" or "right industry", etc. What I do then is contact the agency and try to form a better individual relationship: the more savvy consultants have their contacts, and if you're a good candidate, they may be able to forward off your CV to someone even though no actual job exists. Good companies are always willing to hire the right sort of talent speculatively (that's what makes them good companies
Are you a genius? I dunno. But common sense is a rare coin nowadays. So is staying in touch with good people. My highest compliments.
Nick Corcodilos
Ask The Headhunter(R)
Do not call secretaries and HR people. Find newspaper articles (or online or whatever) that mention names and call those people. Be very polite and respectful, as well as appreciative of their time. Call to ask questions; do not call to ask for an interview or a job. Call with good questions that the person you're talking to will enjoy answering.
Definitely go check out the Ask the Headhunter site, weekly email newsletter, and book for more details on how to do this.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
All the employer-paid job hunting sites such as Monster , HotJobs , Dice , and CareerBuilder make job hunters look at the same job again and again. JobFan has posted raw data and summaries here showing that fully 75% of postings are duplicates. And more than 40% are posted by recruiters. That just ain't right!
Posting your resume onto Monster is a waste of time. However checking out the job boards is an excellent way to start looking for a job.
I believe the best way to be successful with job boards is to find jobs you are qualified for (and interested in!). But don't hit the send button yet! You MUST call the recruitment firm and talk to the contact person - a good way to start is by saying 'I'm interested in applying for this position and this is my experience - 7 years DBA". Many times I have called and been knocked back straight away - it hurts to be knocked back but at least I saved myself 2 hours crafting a greta covering letter.
I'm good friends with a General Manager who advertised an entry level position and recieved 200 replys. Only 2 people actually RANG in to discuss the position. One of those people was in the reject pile and got put into the 'look at' pile.
One of my friends works in HR and he always looks at the resumes of people who ring in.
Job boards aren't bad things - but you can't sit quiet as a mouse and email resumes in - you MUST call head hunters!
I tried that. It didn't work.
We employ occasionally, and every time we advertise the job on the net (using various sites), we get around 500-800 cv's through. (Our HR team is never larger than 2 part time)
In order to deal with this sort of traffic, we always enclose a test as a mandatory component of the job. We author the test ourselves, and make sure that the questions are open-ended enough to show skills in a large set of areas that are useful for the opening.
Result: 20 cvs that enclose tests, of which 60% can be discarded on first read.
We have an excellent, focussed, motivated and highly skilled team.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.