Saturday, October 20, 2007

A quick run down of job hunting websites

  1. Career Builder- I found this one when craigslist compared itself to it. I don't think I found a single job off of this site, but I did get a cool daily e-mail suggesting dozens of inappropriate jobs.
  2. Craigslist- This was the only job posting site I found to be worth checking daily. They're cheap or free, so they get a lot of small start-ups posting. Depending on your outlook, this may or may not be a good thing. I never had a problem with a scam or otherwise bad link in the tech section, but ymmv. The search is keyword only, but I found it worth my while to browse and read appropriate ads. I got almost all of my interviews off of craigslist. It's also worth checking out the computer gigs section if you have sills that are in demand for small projects, like flash or PHP. They have a resume posting board, but there is no way in hell I was posting identifying information to an open board on craigslist.
  3. Dice- Their job postings in my area were okay but not great. As I've hammered into the ground, the real value comes from posting your resume so others can see it, and I have no idea whether dice is better or worse than its competitors in this area. I suspect it's not a huge difference, because recruiters often refer to seeing my resume on some job posting site, not dice specifically, which makes me think they troll them all. The same company owns clearancejobs.com (for those with a security clearance), jobsinthemoney.com (finance jobs), and a few others. I think the specificity is helpful, but not enough to completely replace other sites.
  4. Hotjobs - I think I found a few jobs to apply to, but the rate of new jobs was such that it was only worth checking every weeks. They have a resume posting board that I've never used, so it could either be a panacea of 1998-style tech start up jobs or a cesspool that McDonalds uses when all the pimply teenagers quit over working conditions.
  5. Indeed- This is a specialized search engine that crawls other job postings sites for positions that fit your criteria. You can't tailor search results the way you can when using a specific site, so you have to wade through a lot of crap, and I have no confidence that it catches every applicable position. In general, I found it useful only for finding job search sites to peruse on my own.
  6. Monster- Like hotjobs, monster was filler when craigslist wasn't giving me enough positions to fulfill my obligations to the unemployment office. Unlike hotjobs, I know of a confirmed case of someone posting his resume to monster and getting a callback, leading to a job at a company known for their agonizing death marches. This same company found my resume on dice. So really, I don't have much useful information about monster either.
  7. College Grad- entry levels jobs. I didn't here about this till recently, so I have no idea how good it is.
  8. Your friendly local unemployment office- my state has a computerized job posting board. The quality isn't bad, but the rate of new interesting postings makes monster look like craigslist. It was worth looking through once, and would probably have been worth looking through again a month or two after that, but nothing you could count on.

If anyone else has other sites to suggest, or information about any of these sites, do let me know.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here's a list of 100 niche job search websites that you might want to look into (http://www.businesscreditcards.com/bootstrapper/100-niche-job-boards-for-web-workers/).

Of course, with something like 45,000 job search, career, and related websites, your comparisons might take awhile.

I'd like to add my own blog to your list, and hope that you find it worthy ;-)

As a CIO, CTO and VP for nearly 15 years, I helped sell the division I helped created last year. Since then, like you, I have been documenting the research, tips, techniques and accomplishments of my own job search.

My blog and articles can be found on CIO Magazine's online source, CIO.com (http://advice.cio.com/blogs/cio_job_search_a_real_life_chronicle).

I look forward to your comments!!!

Mark Cummuta