I have to confess, I’m continually amazed by the number of job seekers whose sole method of finding a job is responding to postings on employment sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. Now I’m not saying that job boards have no value. But if that’s your only job search strategy then you’re up against some very long odds. The problem with most big online jobs boards is that there’s just too much qualified traffic cruising them every day. When a promising ad shows up, the posting company is overwhelmed with responses – hundreds and sometimes thousands. It’s hard to get noticed in a crowd that large.
Another problem is that even after the posting company has interviewed a dozen people and chosen a likely candidate, they may not remember or bother to take down their ad. So, you may be applying for a job that doesn’t even exist anymore. No surprise that you never hear back when you respond to one of these ads. But is there any way to use online ads effectively?
You can start by limiting the amount of time you’re spending on them. Statistics show that online jobs boards are responsible for about 5 to 10% of the jobs that are gotten out there. That means that if you’re spending any more than 10% of your available job-finding time searching and answering online ads then you’re not allocating your time effectively. It’s like eating fast food – something you can do once in a while, an occasional guilty pleasure. But you wouldn’t eat it for every meal (unless of course, you’re Gordon Spurlock, the guy who made “Super Size Me”.)
But if you do want to include online employments sites in your job search strategy than I recommend using one of the vertical search sites such as Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com or Alltop.com. These sites aggregate or ‘scrape’ job listings from thousands of individual job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages and post them in a single location. That will save you the trouble of searching multiple sites with the same criteria. You should be aware that several of the biggest employment sites, including Craigslist and Monster, aren’t too keen on these aggregators and have banned some of them from harvesting and re-posting their listings.
When searching these sites, if you do see a job that looks like a perfect match for your skills and experience, rather than submitting for it online, try to find someone who can walk your resume in through the back door. That typically would be someone who is working for the company – or did at one time and still has contacts there. This might be someone in your current circle or somebody you’re able to locate using the social media, such as LinkedIn or Twitter.
But, if the only focus of your job-finding efforts is answering online ads, then it’s time you learned about the five other ways to find a job, especially my ‘New Networking’ technique and start introducing some balance into your job-finding efforts. That’s the best way to work with the online jobs boards. Treat them like a trip to Wendy’s or Burger King. They’re great on occasion – but don’t make a steady diet of them.