OUR STEP-BY-STEP
GUIDE HELPS YOU CUT THROUGH THE BEVY OF CAREER RESOURCES ON
THE NET AND USE THE TOOLS TO YOUR MAXIMUM ADVANTAGE
Soon after Susan
Bruton moved to San Diego to take a job as a human resources
specialist at IXL, an e-business services company, she was
laid off. Since she had few contacts in the area, she turned
to the Internet to find a new job.
She signed up with national job sites such as Monster.com and
HotJobs.com, where she searched for job openings and posted
her resume for prospective employers to review. She also
frequented regional sites, HR-specific sites, and the Web
sites of companies she particularly wanted to work for. Three
weeks later, Bruton got a new job at CSA Travel Protection. A
recruiter found her resume on Monster and called her for an
interview.
Piece of cake, right? It may sound that way, but finding a job
online isn't easy. Even though she got several bites from
interested companies, most of them were just nibbles. "The job
sites gave me a false sense of security," Bruton says. "I'd
get really excited about getting e-mail responses from
different companies requesting more information. But then I'd
never hear from them again."
Of the 82 prospective employers who looked at her resume on
Monster, only 1 called for an interview. Fortunately, that
single call turned into a job she wanted. "I lucked out," she
says.
Her frustration with online job hunting seems to be
commonplace, according to both anecdotal evidence and a study
by Forrester Research. Ads for some career sites suggest that
you simply go online, check the listings, post a resume, and –
voila - get a job. But in fact, there are a lot of additional
steps involved. Finding a job on the Web requires quite a bit
of legwork - even for human resources specialists, like Bruton,
who are familiar with the ins and outs of the hiring process.
Nevertheless, the Internet offers bountiful resources that can
help you. You can find career-development advice, tips for
writing resumes, and industry gossip online to help you locate
the right job. You'll need to research your field, craft a
strong resume, and look for jobs at relevant national,
regional, and industry-specific sites. Most important,
however, you need to network - both online and offline.
"Contacts are key to finding a great job," says Richard Bolles,
author of What Color is your Parachute? and a number of other
job-hunting guides. "Without contacts, job hunters ususally
look for work in ways that are opposite to how most employers
prefer to hire."
What's more, having good contacts will give you access to jobs
that may never hit the career sites. When companies have a job
opening, they look first within the company because they
already know whether their employees do good work and have a
personality that fits their office environment. If the
cupboard is bare, employers seek recommendations from people
in the company. As a last resort, they post an ad at a job
site or in a newspaper, or turn to recruiters to look for
viable candidates. Before we look at making contacts, however,
let's explore the phenomenon of job hunting online.
Surveying the Situation
Many job sites, especially those listed in the table below,
list thousands of openings in a vast range of professions. But
the quality of jobs some sites post is less than stellar,
according to a recent Forrester Research survey that asked
3000 users about their experiences with job boards. Some job
seekers feel that ads are frequently misleading, according to
Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "It's unclear if these
jobs are real or if head-hunters are just gathering resumes,"
she says. Instead of going through sites themselves, employers
may hire headhunters to collect resumes, and then decide
whether to pursue those prospects.
When Peter Weddle, publisher of Weddle's Newsletter and other
guides for recruiters, asked people about their online
job-hunting experience, he discovered that job seekers dislike
how job sites work. Job hunters' expectations often exceed
what they find online. They expect in-depth job descriptions,
quick responses, and sites and links that actually work. But
too often they encounter brief job ads (employers often use
the same ads online as they do in the newspaper classified
sections, where they pay by the word, so job descriptions are
scaled down), long delays between the first contact and an
interview, data forms that don't work properly, and sites with
broken links.
Now for the good news: More employers are turning to the Web
to find employees. And as more companies go digital with their
want ads, the types of jobs listed online are growing more
diverse. Today, as many administrative jobs as information
technology positions are posted on the Web; just a few years
ago, almost everything was technology-related.
One thing the Internet can't do for you is ace the interview.
But Web sites such as Vault.com and WetFeet.com can give you
pointers on how to impress your prospective employer when you
finally do meet face-to-face. Now that you have a basic
picture of the online job-hunting world, it's time to consider
five essential steps that will help you find your dream job.
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