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Widen Your Job-hunting Network
Whether you’re looking for a job, or wanting to fill a position,
the Internet can be a helpful tool to add to your search.
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“Labor, if it were not necessary for the existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man,” wrote the 18th century English author Samuel Johnson. Sometimes, though, work can just make you miserable. Whether you’re looking to change jobs, need to hire or are just starting your career, the Internet can help. But, as with everything, the Net is no panacea. And there are serious pitfalls you should beware of. Pounding the electronic pavement can save on shoe leather, not to mention postage and telephone charges. More important, it can reveal possibilities you wouldn’t find otherwise. Online recruitment is good for employers too. It can save a company up to $8,000 per person hired, according to a study by Creative Good, an e-commerce consulting firm in New York City, NY. This figure breaks down into $2,000 saved in advertising costs and $6,000 saved in time spent looking for a new hire. “More companies are using the Web every day in their recruiting efforts,” says Gary Resnikoff, president of National Career Search, which publishes Career Magazine (www.careermag.com). A study from the online recruiting firm recruitsoft.com (recruitsoft.com) backs this up. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s 500 largest companies use their Web sites for recruiting, up from 60 percent last year and 29 percent in 1998. STICK TO THE BEST In a study involving interviews of 3,000 online consumers, market research firm Forrester Research found that only four percent of respondents landed their last job using the Internet compared with 40 percent who got work from referrals and 23 percent from newspaper ads. You therefore have to be smart about how you use the Net to find work, says Pam Dixon, author of the book Job Searching Online For Dummies. Stick to the best job sites, she says. Though the online recruitment industry has consolidated lately, there are still hundreds of job sites out there. Well-regarded examples include general-purpose sites such as Monster.com (www.monster.com) and CareerPath.com (www.careerpath.com). MediaBistro.com, a publishing jobs site (www.mediabistro.com), is a good example of a niche site. Dixon includes a more extensive list of what she considers the best online job sites at her site, called the Dixon Report (www.thedixonreport.com), in the section called The Online Job Search Companion. Another site that recommends job sites is the Riley Guide (www.rileyguide.com). Created by Margaret F. Dikel, nee Riley, co-author of the book The Guide to Internet Job Searching, the site is also a good place to bone up on the basics of job seeking. It offers tutorials on preparing résumés, researching employers, interviewing and salary negotiating. AVOID THE PITFALLS Another big mistake is not following directions, says Dixon. If a company accepts e-mailed résumés, for instance, it probably specifies that you should include your résumé as plain text within the body of the e-mail message rather than as a Microsoft Word file attached to the message. Yet many people still send attachments, which just causes your effort to be deleted unread out of fear that the attachment may contain a virus. If you already have a job, Dixon warns against posting your résumé to an online job site. She says she has talked to more than a dozen human-relations professionals who admit to scanning résumé databases looking for disgruntled employees. It’s smarter to look for job leads and e-mail your résumé to specific companies. For employers, the biggest mistake is assuming that only technical people search for work online, says Ward Christman, president of Jobnet.com (www.jobnet.com), a regional job site. Only 30 percent of the jobs advertised at his site are related to information technology, a percentage that has decreased every year since he became involved with the online career industry 1992. The most common jobs posted at his site are those in customer service and in marketing and sales. Most people shouldn’t rely exclusively on the Internet in their
job search. But if you’ve found that looking for work has turned
into a devil of a job, and if you do it right, the Net just might work
wonders for you. Reid Goldsborough is a syndicated columnist and author of the book Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway. He can be reached at reidgold@netaxs.com or http://members.home.net/reidgold. |
More Articles by Reid Goldsborough More Online Articles 
Nearly 80 percent of the world’s 500 largest companies use their Web sites for recruiting.
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