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?"

Comments

hrm, I disagree.

[tedtimmons]

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.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[matad0r]

I was laid off back in June of last year when the company I worked for for 7 years decided to up and move to Chicago and I chose not to.

My experience during the 6 months of unemployment that followed was that headhunters and huge job websites were about equally useless.

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.

What finally worked for me was aggressively working my personal network of IT people I had met over the years. After only about a month of that, I had two offers to choose from, both for jobs that had never been published in any newspaper or website.

Bottom line: while I wouldn't recommend discounting the websites and headhunters altogether, I certainly wouldn't rely on them.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[jhoger]

My experience is that the only contact I get from sites like Dice and Monster are from headhunters.

All my best leads on new contracts have come from friends or customers. Every once in a while I've gotten a call from a headhunter but it has never led to anything.

-- John.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Well if you're going to look at the context, you may as well look at the article.

You can't compare most newspaper job listings to online job boards because most newspaper job listings are run by the same job board.

The article is very fair, provides information that I did not have access to otherwise, and does not promote headhunters in any way. The only thing it promotes is (shocker) finding jobs via personal networking.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[artemis67]

C'mon, look at the context. The name of the site is asktheheadhunter.com. Whose interests do they have in mind?

Actually, I've been on his mailing list for about a year, and I've found his writings to be very insightful.

Common sense ought to tell you that when a decent job with decent pay pops up on a national job board, there's going to be a lot of competition. I know my own company's experience with FlipDog was that they were OVERWHELMED with responses, to the point that stopped using the service.

The ATH newsletter is all about circumventing the traditional job application process, getting your foot in the door at the company you want to work at BEFORE the job is posted, and making a strong impression instead of just being one resume in a stack of thousands. His suggestions will undoubtably push you to be more outgoing than what most job seekers are comfortable with, but that's what puts you ahead of everybody else in the game.

A great resource, IMO.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[tedtimmons]

I can understand that, and I'm sure he's got a lot of good points.

I think the best resource for jobs is friends and 'networking associates'. They tend to know about jobs in their workplace before it becomes public, so you can be an early applicant, at the very least.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

When I graduated and was looking for a job, I submitted my resume to some jobs I found on Monster and a few on my local newspaper's section at, IIRC, CareerBuilder. In total, about 20 positions over the course of 2 months.

I got 0 response. Zip, zilch, nada. Except for the confirmation email telling me my resume was submitted for that particular listing, I got nothing. No calls, no emails, nothing. And I was qualified for the job.

And I got my current job by knowing somebody who worked at the company. I knew somebody at another company too, called them, they checked, but they didn't have anything open for me at the time. But the guy said to get back in touch if I hadn't found anything in a few months.

Word of mouth, networking (not that kind, the kind where you *gasp* talk to people!), and having contacts in companies seem to be the best way to go, and I didn't even need to read a study to figure that out.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[TopShelf]

Even worse, how many IT jobs are even posted in the paper anymore. I keep an eye on the total of IT ads in the Indianapolis Star each Sunday, and for the last few months it has run from a low of 3 to a high around 10. I know Indy isn't exactly the Silicon Prairie, but it doesn't look like employers are using the newspapers anymore for tech hiring.

As for personal jobhunting experience, the last two times I placed my resume on boards (Headhunter.net) I was contacted by a recruiter who placed me in a good job. Of course, YMMV...

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[jdavidb]

Ask the Headhunter sells a book and offers a free website and newsletter. All three are simply spectacular sources of advice, whether you are unemployed or not. I hype it every chance I get (and made a recent post about it here on slashdot; I wonder if the article submitter discovered ATH through my post).

Nick Corcodilos is not trying to hype his services as a headhunter. He no longer even works as a headhunter. A common misconception about headhunters is that job seekers should look for them or hire them. That is not true, and rarely happens. Headhunters are hired by employers looking to fill a position. You're not likely to be able to hire a headhunter to get you a job; instead you'll be contacted by a headhunter if he's aware of you through his contacts and thinks you're suitable for a position he is looking to fill.

Corcodilos is looking to sell his book, but he gives out tons of free advice through his website and weekly newsletter. He's even interacted with interested geeks on slashcode based forums like use Perl;. ATH floated around as a meme in the Perl community due mainly to Andy Lester starting around 2002. That was very convenient for me because I was "surplussed" in late 2002. I bought the ATH book immediately and have found its advice invaluable ever since (yes, I do have a job, and I still find the advice invaluable). Andy Lester used the ATH information to help in making hiring decisions.

The comparisons you suggest between job boards and headhunters don't make any sense, since headhunters don't offer a service to job seekers. If you read the site, you will see this for yourself.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[cshark]

If you use these job boards the way you're supposed to use them, then this article is probably right. I have found every job I've ever had on either dice or monster. The way I do it... I cheat.

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.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[ivan256]

There are two types of headhunters. The ones that find you, and the ones you go find. You'll have a much better experience with the former than the latter.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[ChaosDiscord]

The job sites kept sending me nothing but "work at home" jobs (probably stuffing envelopes or telemarketing or something else distasteful.)

If it was just distasteful work that wouldn't be so bad. But if you get an "job offer" that refuses to clairify the nature of the work and is work at home, you can pretty much assume that it's a scam. Federal Trade Commission's warning on Work-at-Home schemes. Cockeyed.com investigated the Work-at-Home signs that often litter neighborhoods.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[AWhistler]

Your experience is the same as mine. I've posted this very thing before as well. Monster and WashingtonPost job boards are useless. The list of headhunters I had three years ago has nobody left still doing that work. I worked my personal network as well, and I got a few hits. I also got one offer...a good offer. I'm just waiting to be told when and where to start.

The job boards do serve one purpose. They're good at filling out the unemployment forms online on where I've applied to positions. I had over 150 to choose from...at least 20 a week. It's a good thing they will accept three a week or I'd be filling out the forms forever.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[H8X55]

What i find even more frusterating are the jobs listed on monster, hotjobs, etc that are headhunting companies attemtping to fill positions for other firms. i usually get a phone interview w/ some asshole that knows nothing about the actual specifics of the job other than a list of requirements.

They're constantly trying to talk you down on salary. The first communication he'll indicate the job is paying between $20 and $25 an hour based on relavant experience. By the next call, it's down to $20 to $22. By the third call it's $20, and if you make it even further you find out it's even less. "$18.65 an hour?!? I'm making more than that now! I thought you said $20! What do you mean up to $20.

I usually find the best leads are from friends, contacts, and former co-workers whose companies are hiring.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[Safety Cap]

The ones that find you (the REAL headhunters) are working for a company. You can't "hire" them to find you a company. The people you solicit are more accurately called "pimps," "body shops," or "resume database fillers."

You'll have a much better experience with the former than the latter.

Very true. That's why you have to be your own "headhunter" in order to get a job.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[nehril]

one friend of mine applied to a job that was so perfectly suited to his experience it was eerie. the job description was basically his resume (in a somewhat specialized field too).

He applied via the boards and heard nothing. Applied again because damn, if he wasn't worth a callback on THIS opportunity, the universe is essentially... wrong. Three times, still nothing. Emailed direct, called on the phone, and FINALLY got an interview. He aced it of course and they hired him. But you know what? even though they reposted the job 2 or 3 times (and he re-applied every time they did) when he came in for the interview they had never heard of him before.

99% applications from monster, careerbuilder and all their kind go straight to /dev/null. hiring managers get too many and delete without looking. the rest pass some minimal "highlight the buzzwords in red" match, then get dumped because no intelligence was actually applied to keeping them.

out of 200+ carefully selected applications over the past 6 months to carefully selected postings where I was definitely qualified, I have gotten 3 callbacks from headhunters, and zero from actual employers. Zero.

I use all the tricks. custom resume, custom cover letter, choose carefully, etc. It doesn't matter. When this article cites statistics like "monster has a 3.6% hire rate, compared to 70% hire rate through referrals" I believe it because I've lived it.

So post your resume, but don't expect anything to come of it. spend more time on your personal networking.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[NemoX]

I agree with the disagreement ;)

After my company closed their doors, I pretty much only used monster and was offered several positions. Every week I modified my resume, trying to find the "right one". It took 6 weeks before I started getting the interview offers. In just 8 weeks I had 4 job offers. I only had 3 years experience, and a degree in an unrelated field.

The most important thing is this: it is not a passive job search! You cannot expect them to just come to you! I spent 6-8 hours 3-5 days a week proactively looking on the boards sending out applications. I must have sent out over 30 relevant custom resumes with custom cover letters. I also looked in 4 different states, and had offers in 3 of the 4. My home state being the one with 2 offers...and the midwest (were I am) is not exactly a shining becon of technology positions.

I received a lot of contacts with headhunters from Monster, and even with them, if you do not follow up with them, they are no help. Even if the first headhunter doesn't plant you a job, every week or so, shoot them an email letting them know you are still looking, and ask if they know of anything else.

Also, use (as in abuse) the headhunters. They are great at giving resume pointers, and interviewing tips and good for interviewing practice. If nothing else, they help better yourself for that position you desperatly want.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[NickCorcodilos]

Awright, if somebody's going to praise me (thanks jdavidb) and somebody's going to question my headhunterness, and GoogleAlerts is going to tell me it's happening (man, that was quick), I'd like to set the record straight and maybe even say a few words about my article (Job Board Journalism), which apparently stimulated this thread.

I'm a headhunter (still active, but I'm selective about searches I do). I also run a publishing business called Ask The Headhunter, which has become a lot more fun and a much bigger part of my time. The web site is free. The book isn't. But my agent fleeced my publisher a long time ago for a big advance (that was her job - to get the royalties up front), so while I love to know the book is selling well, nothing I do is designed to sell books. I haven't done another book because it's much more profitable to license my ATH features to web sites, newspapers, periodicals, corporate clients, and the like - so you can read them for free. Those "subsidies" let me keep my own site and newsletter free. Hope that answers some questions about motivations and who I am.

What's more important is the subject of the thread. 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. Do you really think their success rates are decent? I don't. The strongest indication that I'm right: they don't publish their success rates. Never have. never will. Go ahead - ask them. They will never publish their results because they suck. So they talk about "30 million resumes online!". Yah. Ever hear the George Carlin line, "Suppose you could have everything in the world. Where would you put it?"

While I found out about this thread through GoogleAlerts, it was a spate of emails I got from slashdotters who read my article -- all the email so far is from people who think the boards suck, and who have had lousy experiences.

Some people love the boards. No skin off my nose. But if I needed a job, it's the last place I'd look.

Forget headhunters. Like jdavidb points out, headhunters don't find you jobs. We only work for employers, and we don't look for candidates on boards or solicit truckloads of resumes with want ads. The hacks who waste your time not headhunters. They're bottom-feeder recruiters who are dialing for dollars -- and they treat you accordingly if your keywords don't match their limited vocabularies.

One person on this thread said it well: all his/her jobs have come from personal contacts developed over time. Consistently, studies show that 40-70% of jobs are found and filled that way. The big boards seem to be responsible for about 1-3%. Niche boards produce better. Job listings on "professional" sites are better, too. Company sites are pretty good, too. But my casual polls (for about 10 years) of managers suggest that managers hire people they know first; people recommended by people they know second; and then it peters out dramatically. You want a job? Your best bet is to go hang out (literally or virtually) with people who do the work you want to do. That's your best bet -- others get to know you, see your value, and they recommend you to a manager. (Hey, I don't claim it's quick or easy. But it beats blasting out 10,000 resumes and waiting by your screen for an email announcing that you have qualified to be A Successful Telemarker if only you'll ring up your PayPal account for $95.

Speaking of fees: The latest racket on the Big Boards is charging you $79 for a Titanium Upgrade on your resume. That puts your resume "higher on the results list employers get when they do a search for people like you." Yep. 30 million resumes in the data base. Did you know that the "basic deal" on CareerBuilder allows an employer only 300 "results" each day? Lotsa luck getting your Titanium resume up ahead of all the others. More interesting: emloyers are doling out the same payola to get their job listings "played higher on the list". So everybody's paying the boards off for

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[mcrbids]

What finally worked for me was aggressively working my personal network of IT people I had met over the years. After only about a month of that, I had two offers to choose from, both for jobs that had never been published in any newspaper or website.

Truth has been told here!

I'd mod this up, but it's already +5, so I'll reply.

In all my years as an adult, I've never once gone to a "job board" or a "head hunter". I've always worked as a consultant, and I've always worked by referral and personal contact.

Job placement agencies give you meniality. Direct contact and referrals get you the gravy jobs that pay nicely, where the people you work for appreciate your efforts. These jobs are *never* in a newspaper or online site. They are filled by somebody competent with a positive referral long before anybody gets desperate enough to post a job request!

It's the idle conversations after a conference; the golf game last Saturday; the phone call between friends at 8:30; the card club that meets on Thursdays. That is where names get passed around, cards get exchanged, notes get written on napkins, and carefully folded and kept in the wallet.

That is where the real recruitment occurs.

Re:hrm, I disagree.

[pipingguy]

If it was just distasteful work that wouldn't be so bad. But if you get an "job offer" that refuses to clairify the nature of the work and is work at home, you can pretty much assume that it's a scam

Free internet connection (for about 72 hours)!

Have a computer? Like the internet? Wanna make BIG BUCKS while working at home?

Call 1-800-you-spam.

No committments!

My Personal Experience

[abcxyz]

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.

Re:My Personal Experience

[Eagle5596]

My personal experience has been horrible with on-line job applications. When I finally accepted my current position, I asked the head of HR how effective they really were. He said that most of the time HR makes it's hires from recommendations, and paper applications, and that on-line applications tended to be placed in the "read later pile", or worse yet, added to a computer database, which was then searched for key phrases. The end result? While my on-line application never came up in their searches, my paper based one was their top pick (and it was the exact same application).

Just my experience.

Re:My Personal Experience

[PCM2]

While my on-line application never came up in their searches, my paper based one was their top pick (and it was the exact same application).

I doubt the difference really comes down to electronic vs. paper. Probably "form letter" vs. "personalized application" is closer to the truth. If a job site is sending an employer stacks of applications formatted in some uniform way, whomever is supposed to review the applications will probably glaze over very quickly. You ever join a non-digest Internet mailing list? How long did it take before you stopped eagerly reading each new posting that came through the list?

True story!

[Maradine]

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? :)

Re:True story!

[Mick Ohrberg]

I had a little more luck :)

March 14th of 2003 I was laid off from a company I had worked at for more than 2 years. Seeing as how the economy was still very shaky then, I settled in with the idea that I would be unemployed for a long time. I put my resume on Monster (among [many] other sites), and on April 14th, exactly one month later, I started a new job that I got through Monster. Lateral pay move, even. It worked for me!

Re:True story!

[MouseR]

That's true of any new job, and does not necessarily involves job recruitment companies.

I work in Montreal, in a company that, before being bought by a big US multi-national, was doing OK when one of our co-workers was lured at ZeroKnowledge. Remember them?

Months later, he had ZeroEmployment.

The company he feared was going down is now a multi-national and he's out of the loop.

Sometimes, your worse enemy is yourself.

Re:True story!

[TheDukePatio]

Fairy Tales start off: "Once upon a time..."
Sea Stories start off: "No shit..."
IT Folklore starts off: "True story...."

Craigslist

[egg troll]

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! ;)

Re:Craigslist

[savagedome]

Not just the Bay Area but even upstate NY. My friend's brother, who had just graduated was looking for a job. Needless to say that he was submitting his resume' all over the place. Finally, somebody tipped him off about Craiglist.org and bam. First interview, he got right in.
Moral: Craiglist is not just for the Bay Area but works elsewhere too.

Re:Craigslist

[Martin Blank]

I've found Craigslist borderline useless in SoCal. Dice has always gotten the best response for me, though their job search engine sucks. Yahoo's (HotJobs) job search engine is the best (allows such things as saving interesting jobs during search for later review and applications), but has almost as low a response rate as Monster for me.

Maybe it's the impacted market, or maybe it's the ease with which people can apply online with generic form letters and overstated resumes, but I suspect that a lot of employers aren't nearly as interested in the online sites as they once were.

Re:Craigslist

[ThingOne]

While I know lots of people are already aware of craigslist. I believe you ruin the usability if too many people starting using it. Just like earlier mentions of monster.com. It was good at first until everybody found out about it. Now for the downhill spiral of craigslist.

Re:Craigslist

[Elwood P Dowd]

Craigslist is popular with small employers. Small employers, taken together, are the largest employer in the nation (maybe not bigger than the gov't).

Craigslist is IMHO an excellent resource not mentioned by the article. Perhaps it does not have the same pitfalls as Monster 'n' the other crappy job sites.

Re:Craigslist

[dewdrops]

I think lists like smaller, public Craigslists are a much better option to places like Monster. As anyone who used it can tell you, any job listed on Monster will get flooded with resumes, 90% of whom are completely unqualified. Many companies (my current one included) have gone back to using headhunters and internal networking as a result; we just don't have time to sift through 1,500 resumes for each opening.

With small mailing lists, employers don't get deluged with resumes of people "job surfing". And, by the same token, most of the time the listings are placed by the person doing the hiring (not HR), so the applicant knows his resume is going to the right person.

During my most recent job search, I used Monster, Hotjobs, a headhunter, and a number of lists like Craigslist. I got the most, relevant interviews from the latter, though the headhunter was close. Even though I applied for ~300 jobs on Monster and Hotjobs, I didn't receive 1 interview. The job I ended up taking I found on a list for people who are interested in startups in my area. I think using resources like that (and networking) are a much better option than a bulk job listing site like Monster; for the hiring company and the candidate.

Re:Craigslist

[robnator]

I disagree regarding craigslist's (or any good resource) eventual devolution into uselessness, such as that which has marked Monster -- mostly it is the quality of people (term used loosely) using the board: Monster is overrun by headhunter orgs posting not-quite false jobs to lure a constant feed for their body hoppers. This generates a situation where the board looses apparent functionality. Since many organizations post to craigslist directly, the effect of the typical strategies of "placement services" is diluted and may not lead to the degradation ThingOne predicts (my hope, anyways).

Post a resume

[Geeyzus]

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

HR people don't like them.

[grub]

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)

Re:HR people don't like them.

[johnkoer]

When I was looking for a job late last year (lucky me, I found one) I was talking with an HR person and she told me that for every job they post they get 200+ resumes within a few days.

I find the boards very useful and I only apply for jobs that I think I have the right qualifications for, but I have seen some people run a query on a general keyword (i.e. Developer, Programmer, Analyst, ...) and submit their resume without even reading the job spec. I guess when you are not working you have a lot more time to spending clicking that little submit button.

Please

[jdc180]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[yohaas]

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.

Hm.

[scowling]

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...

The wife

[Broken_Windows]

spends 8 hours a day on monster's boards, been that way for 3 years...

a resource

[tverbeek]

Does anyone in IT even use these boards to look for a job?

As long as they're there and employers are posting jobs on them, you'd be a fool not to.

gotta tickle the monster once in a while.

[ender_wiggins]

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.

Re:gotta tickle the monster once in a while.

[Mechanik]

Yeah, I find I need to "tickle the monster" at least twice a day to keep my switch flipped.

Er, I mean... no...

You Know It's a Bad Sign When...

[tealover]

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.

Of course it's a fraud, unless you work in IT

[StuWho]

"Is it a fraud? You decide. Devote an hour each day -- about 12% of your working time -- surfing one of the many CareerBuilder or Monster.com sites, or DirectEmployers.com, or CareerJournal.com. Scan the job postings. Read the advice. Update your resume daily. Your challenge is to justify your investment."

And to justify the loss of your salary when your boss catches you.

my experience

[bsDaemon]

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.

I found all 3 of my jobs online

[t1nman33]

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.

Last Resort

[FortKnox]

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.

These boards are only one source.

[Omni Magnus]

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.

We throw out 2000 apps a month

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I think

[jiffah]

"Does anyone in IT even use these boards to look for a job?"

More importantly;
Does anyone in HR use these boards to look for an employee?

i use

[Anonymous Coward]

yourjobisnowinindia.com

It all depends

[lukewarmfusion]

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.

Missing some Key Data...

[Thalia]

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

If you're not getting results may I recommend...

[vicparedes]

monsterindia.com?

Apparently, it's the best out there. =D

Good Experience

[j_kenpo]

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.

Where do I go when I need a job?

[silentrob]

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)

Worked for me

[nphinit]

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.

Re:Worked for me

[Knightfall]

Mod this guy up! That has absolutely been the key for me (I am looking again after getting being forced into a, um, tolerable position). I took the time each day, first thing in the morning to update each online resume, even if it was only moving a space here or there. I consistently got calls. Mind you, many were recruiters that barely spoke english trying to get me to take incredibly short contract work, but it did end up with me getting a couple of solid offers (from HR people cruising the sites) that I am now negotiating between :-)

Monster worked for me... with a catch

[shallow monkey]

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....

From the other end...

[lumpenprole]

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.

Re:From the other end...

[jdavidb]

Ask the Headhunter (the website with the original article) has some good advice about hiring.

• This is not a test: a hiring tool for managers (guest author)
• 10 stupid hiring mistakes
• 7 mistakes internal recruiters make
• (more articles)

Re:From the other end...

[rmohr02]

I kept a few of the emails I thought were really funny around for years. Like the ones that were in all caps.

You're not allowed to discriminate based on nationality--Nigerians are people too!

Personal Experience

[clark625]

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.

A haven for Recruiters

[borgheron]

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

Monster versus Insider

[erick99]

I've had to look for a job three times in the last five years (the computer industry is fickle around here). Each time I have checked the email that monster.com faithfully deposits daily into my inbox. I haven't found a job using monster. Each of my jobs, including the one I am interviewing for on Monday, came from people who already worked at the "target" company. Networking is still the best way to get a job for most people. At least, that has been my experience. I am not surprised at the statistics for monster.com's placement rate.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Local job sites

[Spandau87]

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

Direct approach

[nycsubway]

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.

Re:Direct approach

[the_2nd_coming]

yeah, here is a tip....when your wife has a chance at an awsome job, let her take it.

if she had taken the NYU job, you were wide open for columbia.

Nearly Worthless

[blunte]

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.

Online resume

[jeroen94704]

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.

CareerBuilder

[mog]

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.

Headhunters use job boards

[Stone316]

2 years ago a headhunter saw my resume on monster.ca and gave me call. In the end I got a job for a company I was dying to work for.

I would say that job boards make it even easier for headhunters to find people.

Re:Headhunters use job boards

[mcspock]

I'm glad someone else has something positive to say.

4 years ago i was getting 3 calls a day due to dice and monster; last summer i was laid off and posted a resume again. Sure, things slowed down a bit, and it took a month or two and a professionally written resume, but i got a job offer with a 12% raise at a good company a block from my house. And even now, i'm being courted by a much larger company and will likely be offered a much larger raise, solely after they found my resume on monster.

Job boards are like advertising, for people that have something marketable they work well.

Local Job Boards

[Dareth]

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.

good if you are fishing

[i3spanky]

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.

Often jobs are posted that don't exist

[scootr1]

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.

If all your friends are laid off.... Yes

[muckdog]

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.

Craigs List

[GeekTek]

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

Stay away from Jobwarehouse.com & their afflia

[mmmuttly]

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.

Oh, you're trying Monster's AMERICAN site?

[michael path]

Try here:

http://www.monsterindia.com/

More to do with job market

[Rasvar]

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.

Americanjobs.com = spammer too.

[mmmuttly]

He's another jerk that spams recruiter.

Right Track, Wrong Train

[bbsguru]

Yes, it's all about the URL, but not that one.

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 because....

[oZZoZZ]

maybe it doesn't work becuase your resume looks like this.

Re: Job Boards Suck

[shambalagoon]

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.

Everything in proportion

[RhetoricalQuestion]

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.

Self inflicted spam.

[rumblin'rabbit]

We don't dare file want ads on those boards. Once upon a time it took an hour or so, and a postage stamp, for someone to respond to an ad. Now it takes a few minutes. The result - hundreds and hundreds of responses to each ad, of which only a tiny fraction are worth any consideration.

We've had much better luck posting ads on the bulletin boards of local user groups and professional associations.

Scam Alert

[clueless123]

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)

job boards

[themib]

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.

These sites didn't work for me

[gupg]

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.

my experience

[j0s)(]

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.

Small Business Point Of View

[mgeneral]

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

Re:Small Business Point Of View

[w0lver]

Having been a hiring manager of a small company, hiring a lot (30 or more) of tech people, the Internet job board saved money over recruiting fees most times. I found it paid to have one account at one of the top 3 boards, (I would have to say not Monster being the most expensive), would generate good leads. However, sifting through the 200 non-qualified people was a real pain to find the two or three you wanted to call back.

Anyway, I am now one of the unemployed and have tried all the job boards, even some pay ones, responded to about 50 different postings and 99% of them are black holes. No repsonse...

So to save my time I created a job meta-search engine and now I sell subscription to it for $6 bucks a month. I have a few hundred subscribers and sold it branded to a local college. Doesn't pay the bills yet, but keeps me from draining all my savings. The irony is I get a couple emails a week of people finding jobs with my product, but alas, I still have not...

If you want to check it out, please do... http://www.careerfish.com

w0lver

I sort of agree

[philiph]

Check out what I wrote about this on my website.

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.

My results...

[Mongoose Disciple]

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 who you know...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

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! :)

Re:It's who you know...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Oh, don't say "hit me up"...my wife might be reading this...

My experiences

[Karl Cocknozzle]

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.

You insensitive clod.

[user no. 590291]

I can code FORTRAN on punch cards.

monster = good and bad

[rjnagle]

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.

UK experience.

[Paul Johnson]

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.

Craigslist is the best

[faust2097]

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.

Re:Craigslist is the best

[TheSync]

I second this. In the current era, why should employers PAY to have an ad on Monster? For things like web design and development where you can expect 1,000 resumes to come over your desk, just post to Craigslist. My wife regularly does this when she is hiring, and gets excellent candidates (once the wheat and chaff are separated).

Also the job sites of potential employers is a good idea as well. I got my current job from the company's career section of their web site.

Specialized organization web sites are good as well. When my wife was looking for an architecture job, she found it on the American Institute of Architects career web site.

Here is a bigger question - has anyone gotten a job through Friendster/Tribe/Linked-In?

Work-at-Home Jobs

[Robotech_Master]

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.

These sites are brutal

[styrofoam15]

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.

not IT but

[BigBir3d]

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 don't take most job postings seriously

[Go Aptran]

I temped at an HMO for about a year and they finally were forced to hire me because they could no longer keep temps, due to a newly implemented policy.

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.

As someone who hires a few IT staff each year

[airjrdn]

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.

Recipe for disaster.

[hndrcks]

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.

Re:If you're not getting results may I recommend..

[dasmegabyte]

Unless you live in india. Then, may I suggest monsterphilipines.com?

Re:From a company that is hiring

[Raven42rac]

What if it burned the toast, would you give them a shot then?

A friend of mine at Monster...really

[rjamestaylor]

Friend of mine worked in a high-level tech position with Monster. Time came for me to look for a job a while back and I asked his advice where to look. Without hesitation he said: don't bother with web job boards.

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:

From: Careers [mailto:careers@pxxxx-txxxxx.com]
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 10:09 AM
To: []
Subject: Interview

Hello Robert, My name is Mr. Txxxxx Wxxxx and I am a consultant with Pxxxxx-Txxxxx. I am e-mailing you because your credentials have just come across my desk and I must say they are very impressive. I am working on filling numerous job searches and you may qualify for one or more. I would like to sit down with you to explore your background sometime this week for about one half hour to see if in fact we could help place you. My direct line is 949-721-6xxx and when you call if I am not available, please leave a message with a couple of good days and times for you to meet. I schedule appointments from 7 AM to 3:30 PM Monday through Friday. Please call in today.

Thank You,

Mr. Txxxx Wxxxx
Consultant

Pxxxxx-Txxxxx, LLC
949-721-6xxx

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.

You might also get struck by lightning....

[Halcyonandon]

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.

Headhunters will get squeezed..

[sadr]

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

Life Insurance Salesman

[BigBlockMopar]

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.

Re:Life Insurance Salesman

[nomadic]

Forget the job hunting websites, they're just crap. Pound the pavement yourself.

Do both. I got one job through the websites, after months of nothing. But it was actually kind of a decent job.

Re:Life Insurance Salesman

[nyseal]

I agree totally. After 2 months of mild depression because of the layoff, I got down and dirty with the job boards. Here a resume, there a resume everywhere a resume. No luck. After 2 more months I got down and dirty 'pounding the pavement'. Personal meetings, walk-ins and lobby sitting to meet SOMEONE....ANYONE. Eventually, after waiting about 2 1/2 hours in a company lobby, the secretary felt so bad for me she 'found' the time to introduce me to the COO of the company. As it turned out, they had just fired a department manager that day and he decided to do the full interview with me. I got the job. Lucky, yes...but it still wasn't my dream job. It paid the bills nonetheless. I never did take my resumes off of those job boards and ironically 4 months later I got a phone call from another company. "I found your resume on Monster. Are you still looking for employment?" I decided, what the hell and at least went for the interview; I had nothing to lose. Today, I have my dream job, the salary I wanted and a boss who backs me 110%. Go figure.

Re:Life Insurance Salesman

[glesga_kiss]

I've gotta agree. I've been looking for something new here in the UK and I've found similar experiences.

What irked me the most was the repetition of the jobs accross the sites. You'd see the same job with a different description on multiple places. This is a serious problem if you apply for both, as the different agencies will fight over the fees. Often in this scenario, both agencies and the employer will simply walk away from you as it's not worth the hassle.

When phoning them, they absolutely will not tell you the name of the company. Which is a huge factor in deciding if the role interests you or not! In the end I had a routine where I'd reel of a whole list of companies as my first question to avoid wasting time.

And the result from all this? Well, only got a few interviews, each of them from people I knew in the industry, already working in companies. Nothing from the agencies at all. And it's not as though I'm a muppet; I've got a good CV and was offered every job I interviewed for.

Like you, I believe that a lot of jobs on the sites are fakes. There were several that were a perfect match for my skill set that by all rights I should have at least had an interview for. Either the agencies are completely inept, or they are making it up. I suspect a bit of both.

Perhaps a new saying: Those who can, do. Those who can't, work for job agencies.

You must be active...

[vidarh]

I got my current job by using one of the job sites.

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... :)

All worthless

[GoMMiX]

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.

What an in-house recruiter told me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

IT Directors hate them too....

[CptTripps]

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...

We try to filter out work at home

[pHaze]

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.

Re:We try to filter out work at home

[weekendgeek]

Actually, his site provided a much more accurate search result for my area than Monster, Dice, and the others. Also, there were no "work-from-home" ads that appeared. So who's the loser?

Re:We try to filter out work at home

[dgmartin98]

Not a bad idea for a site! And it seems to work well. Any plans to expand it to Canadian job sites as well? I'm in Vancouver, so all my searchs for "engineer" in "Vancouver" give me results for Vancouver, Washington.

BTW, to the AC who replied "loser" to this thread - Mark has a perfectly fine post. It's entirely on-topic, informative, and it just happens to benefit him as well.

Dave

Re:We try to filter out work at home

[rockwood]

Though your method doesn't seem to work.

Skill keyword - internet
Location - 17046

first hit

INTERNET MARKETING, GUARANTEED FREE LEADS, NO INVESTMENT
Job Summary: INTERNET EMPLOYMENT, WORK ANY-TIME, ANY-PLACE,! GUARANTEED FREE LEADS EVERY MONTH*, NO INVESTMENT, NO KITS, NO MLM,100% INTERNET, AVAILABLE! WE ARE NOT AN "OPPORTUNITY" EMPLOYER, WE HAVE POSITIONS READILY AVAILABLE...

Re:We try to filter out work at home

[pHaze]

Thanks for the feedback and to the 446 people who visited the site, tried the search and some who filled out our survey. I've definitelly been inspired to work my butt off to deliver the best search results.

Dave, our goal is to get the search algo working perfectly, then to expand the search to all english speaking countries. Most notably, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Headhunters and Jobs Boards

[yintercept]

Headhunters..... I despise them

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.

Headhunters are nice if you're already working ...

[compactable]

... if you're employed & don't have time to do the door-to-door thing, headhunters can be nice. As long as they know what you go for, so they don't bug you everytime some restaurant calls them looking for a busboy.

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.

The Web has replaced the help-wanted in the paper

[m11533]

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.

free software resume portal

[eries]

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.

100% success rate

[pvera]

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.

Local web-board did me good

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

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.

Watch out, if you're currently employed

[AbbyNormal]

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..).

An Employer's Prespective

[dschnur]

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?

Headhunters that find you

[KnarfO]

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.

Re:Headhunters that find you

[shemnon]

When the job market improves back to where it was durring the dot com era? Improves? Do you seriously call that a good situation? Sure it was great to extort large sums of money for essentially transient skills for a time. But what was we had in '98 and '99 was a very sick economy indeed. The wise ones stashed money away but unless you won the IPO lottory at the right time you've got to be counting your blessings to have a stable job and a paycheck.

Seriously, I feel this jobless recovery is a reaction to the extreme sellers market and financial excesses of the gilded ages of the internet boom.

Some things are best left in our history.

If You're In The UK...

[CowboyBob500]

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

Job hunting nightmare

[JWSmythe]

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

Here in Denver. . .

[walterbyrd]

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.

Job Boards

[salesgeek]

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.

Also not the best bet for finding employees

[gopherdata]

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.

Re:Also not the best bet for finding employees

[pipingguy]

...small internet entertainment company in Montreal

Did you mispell "web-enabled strip club" there?

Re:Also not the best bet for finding employees

[justins]

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.

The right way to make these people go away is to call them back and tell them you're not interested. If someone calls you several times they might just assume their messages are getting lost in voice mail.

They might just assume that if you had made a decision, you'd do them the courtesy of returning their call, and your not doing so was because you were busy or something. Crazy, huh?

let's be clear.

[RomulusNR]

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.)

I doubt I'm going to get a reply, but...

[Ieshan]

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.

Re:I doubt I'm going to get a reply, but...

[itwerx]

If you actually bothered to read the stuff on his site you'd find that most of it is pure common sense distilled into a readable fashion and applied specifically to the job-seeking process.
Seriously, as is so often posted in other threads here - RTFA! (Or in this case RTFW! :)

Headhunters, all of them.

[cyranoVR]

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.

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, .NET...") "Cast a wide net." Makes you wonder about the validity of those "language popularity surveys" that are based on job board listings...

Re:headhunter.net and MLM guys

[britain]

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.

One quote I found interesting

[MadAnthony02]

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 used them "back in the day"

[bferrell]

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 object to all of this cultural discrimination.

[saihung]

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.

Re:SERIOUS flaws in your argument

[bigtrick]

i feel a need to correct you. 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. that would just mean that 70% of postings on job boards are filled. the fact that you're competing for only the 3.6% of all jobs that are available, and the fact that you are competing with however many millions of other users for those same 3.6% still remain. 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. while true, this does not change the validity of his arguments. And the worst part is, you fail to remind the readers that your interests lie orthogonal to those of the job services. actually, he addressed that. 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. actually, job boards are attempting to be middlemen themselves. "removing the middleman" would be using your networking skills to find a job. like people have said.

Avoid the body shops/resume warehouses

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Getting your foot in before the job is posted

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this.

[MastrTek]

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.

Fax your way to a new job :) this worked for me.

[Zizkus]

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.

Monster...ain't so bad

[kickus_assus]

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 send references with a resume

[Skapare]

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.