 | Click a Mouse, Find a Job. Maybe.by Dave Tenenbaum
The Web is the universal marketplace. The national yellow pages. And a boundless "help-wanted" column. Even while headlines talk unemployment, countless jobs are begging for your attention at thousands of Web sites. A good job may be just a few mouse-clicks away, but as with anything Internet, you have to know what you are doing. You can waste a lot of time, or get taken by costly scams. You can annoy potential bosses.
Worst case? You can wind up alerting your present boss that you're job hunting.
Of course, you'll run across the usual level of Web-based nonsense. In Texas, jobs at http://www.twc.state.tx.us/jobs/gvjb/gvjb.html OR WorkInTexas.com are listed on the "Governor's Job Bank" (is anyone else hiring in the Lone Star State?). In Wisconsin, a short notice for a computer job managed to misspell "Macintosh" twice, in two different ways. On NASA's job page, we clicked "SES opportunities" and learned, "At this time NASA's Senior Executive Service (SES) vacancies are not posted to NASA's job site." Thanks a bunch. But remember, it may be the only outfit on the Web actually hiring astronauts.
Employers pay $400 to $8,500 for the right to comb through resumes.
But enough entertainment. If you need a job, you can get help from several types of Web sites:
- Many company, government, and institutional sites have a "jobs," "careers," or "employment" page.
- Information and assistance sites can help with resumes, interview techniques, even salary negotiations.
- Career sites contain massive numbers of searchable electronic help-wanted ads.
The career sites
Most people probably start searching at the career sites, portals with something for everyone. At most sites, you can search for jobs by city, region, industry, profession, and sometimes by individual company. The listings actually are paid help-wanted ads, and they are not cheap: An "express ad" at monster.com, for example, costs the employer $305 for 60 days. Many sites allow you to post your resume, and have both links and ads for services that promise to make your resume attractive and searchable.
The biggest commercial site, monster.com, lists a raft of jobs (last April, a survey found an average of 25,500 listings each day), together with some amusing, helium-filled verbiage. A company advertising a "dream job" (interviewing and evaluating models, singers, and actors) for example, painted this word-picture of itself: "At our core, Company X is a company centered around all walks of talent". Judging by the number of times the dream job was posted, some of those dreams were more like nightmares.
Computers: no geniuses
When you search for jobs at CareerBuilder, another large site, you can specify "freshness" so you only will see listings posted within three, seven, or 30 days. But how good are the search engines--which are the core of virtually all career sites? Maybe not so great. We asked about work as a technical writer in Chicago, and were offered a slew of computer jobs, including a "jave developer" (this position would work on JavaScript, but apparently would need not to b detail-orynted). Although this hardly was our idea of technical writing, a second listing managed to be even less relevant: a metal plater. "This person will be loading metal coils into a machine and then adjusting the strength of the chemicals as needed."
This search, like many others, showed that, when it comes to understanding English, the search engines are as dumb as the average computer. Obviously, this limits the utility of the search functions. It also is a critical drawback for the "personal agents" featured at many job sites.
Outside of computers and related technical industries, your odds of finding a job through the Web are pretty poor
These agents--at CareerBuilder and elsewhere--supposedly automate the searching of these huge lists. The agents analyze your searches to identify your interests and requirements, then automatically e-mail you when relevant jobs are posted. Agents sound too good to be true, and if the search function returns such screwy results, they probably are.
Unlike some others, CareerBuilder prominently features a giant, hot-linked list to job listings at hundreds of American corporations. But because it's so expensive to list at the commercial career sites, corporate, university, and government sites can list more jobs at their own sites, where you may have better luck. Last April, for example, when the top three private career sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs) listed a total of 47,500 jobs, the top 500 American corporations had almost 75,000 positions on their Web sites.
See the sidebar "Taking in the sites" for a slew of job-related Web sites, including a federal catch-all employment site and a site linking to a national assortment of newspaper want ads.
Hunting for resumes
Searching for jobs is one way to use the career Web sites. A second way is to post your resume so employers can search them and find you. A resume that is posted must contain the keywords that interested employers will search for. A computer professional should list languages and programs, for example. Similarly, a language translator should get specific: Italian, French, or Swahili, for example.
Posting your resume generally is free, after you open a free account at a career site. But for an extra fee, CareerBuilder will jack your resume to the top of the heap, so employers will see it first. This expense could help you stand out in a crowded sector of the job market, but it reminds us of the search engines that take payoffs to push listings to the top. Both practices make us wonder about impartiality.
At any rate, the fee structure of career sites indicates that the resumes will get scrutiny. At Monster.com, employers pay $400 to $8,500 for the right to comb through resumes. Anyone paying like that must be in a hiring mood.
On the Web and off, writing a resume can be a tricky process--you need to seem appealing and available without seeming desperate. If you need help writing a resume, the Web is full of resources, although you can run into some fees. Resume.com, for example, charges $229 for basic resume writing and $699 for a full service project (at either price, you are guaranteed a job interview). Judging from the "before" and "after" resumes posted at the site, even a decent resume can get quite a lift from the professional touch. If you only search the Web, you could miss the perfect job.
Some final cautions
The overwhelming variety and number of "help-wanted" postings on the Internet can be daunting. Don't forget to keep notes on whom you contact, and on the substance of each contact. A separate mailbox in your e-mail program and a separate set of bookmarks in your Web browser will help document your searches.
If you're concerned about keeping your present job until you find a better one, HotJobs, the third of the big three career sites, has a valuable feature. At most sites, your current employer may see your resume while scouting for new hires. HotJobs allows you to block specific employers from seeing your resume.
Finally, when searching for a job on the Web, don't ignore the nonwired world. Richard Bolles, author of "What Color Is Your Parachute," a classic job-hunting book, wrote a fascinating review of Web-based job-hunting. Bolles did the math and says that, outside of computers and related technical industries, your odds of finding a job through the Web are pretty poor. A Web site boasting of listings from 10,000 employers, he notes, would be representing about 0.06% of all American employers.
Hard as it may be to believe in this increasingly wired era, a lot of jobs never hit the Web. If that's the only place you look, you could miss the perfect job.
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