Job seeking from a hunters perspective Blog

JOB BOARDS Need to be revised February 20, 2010

Job boards! We all now them Monster, Hot jobs, Careerbuilder, Dice and the others.

They are like the relative you can’t stand, but have to invite to the party to keep the family happy.

Are the effective? I guess that depends on the position you are seeking. But all in all they only represent about 5- 6 % of the jobs being landing. If I turned in numbers like that at work I would be fired.

They offer some advise and it is the same advice you get everywhere else. Then on Monster every time you click on a posting you have to go through the DO YOU WANT OT FURTHER YOUR EDUCATION screen. Which I find highly annoying. I wold like to see a box that I can click on that says never show this page again.

I did an experiment the other day. I went on Careerbuilder and updated my resume. Low and behold with in minutes I started receiving those form letters. You know the ones, We have read your resume and wish to invite you to be an insurance salesperson or a financial advisor. Really because I have been an engineer most of my life and my resume says right on it that I am looking for and Engineering Manager position. I have no sales experience nor I have I ever worked in either industry but they think I am highly qualified for a position when other companies would think I am under qualified. I know these are probably automatically generated and I feel sorry for the ones that actually have someones name and email address on them because I do send replies of thanks but no thanks and can you comprehend what you read.

The other problem I see with job boards is that the let recruiters post non jobs so as to build up their data base. They also let companies post adds for positions that do not exist just because they want to go fishing or is that phishing to test the waters for when things turn around.  So we as job seekers deligently do what is required to apply only to never hear from anyone.

Then there is the issue of a real job gets posted and then it gets filled but it remains on the boards because the company paid for 30 days and by god we are going to give them their money’s worth. So again they waste our time. I guess they think like others that we have all this free time on our hands (see my post “Since your not busy SAY WHAT!”).

Lets talk about job alerts on the boards. What a joke these are! I received an alert today that I have set up for engineering manager positions. I am gong through the list and what do I see an opening for a cook! Now in my book that is a heck of a stretch for the criteria that I placed. Maybe I should have looked at the posting to see if it was a chef/cook for an engineering manager who negotiated it as part of his compensation package.

I have a job alert on Twitter called TweetMyJob. It provides me with engineering manager positions. The only draw back that I see is that it does not allow me to be industry specific and engineering title cross many industries. Therefore, I have to sift through the posting for other industries. At least I am not wasting my time sifting through cook ads.

So when people ask me if I use the major job boards I tell them yes but I do not put a lot of effort on emphasis on them. I have found that my best placed energy is on LinkedIn and Twitter for opportunities and to research target companies and network.

So if job boards want to be helpful they need to update and refine their job alert search engines so that we only see the jobs we are qualified for and want to apply to and not the plethora of anything that remotes matches any word we have in our search.

The other thing is if you are going to provide resume critiques, they should be done by people who understand the industry and language of the industry that I work in.

Job seekers if you want to have fun, I mean we aren’t busy right?, send your resume to one job board for a free critiques. Makes the suggested changes and then send it to another board for their free resume critique and look at the results.  Ok don’t it is a waste of time. I have already performed this task and it was fun for me. It is like asking three recruiters to comment on your resume and getting three totally different answers. Sorry to spoil your fun.