Getting the most out of Online Job Boards
Do Online Job Boards Really Work?
The short answer is Yes, they do work.
Even though job boards are a new technology that have been
around for just a few years, there are already many signs that
they are a significantly more effective recruiting technology
than what had been used before (mainly newspaper classified
ads). Trying to gauge the effectiveness of job boards is sort of
like trying to figure out how fast you're going in a jet
airplane. At 40,000 feet, you don't realize how fast the plane
was moving you until you get to your destination.
In 2003, Monster.com earned about $423 million dollars from
employers who paid to find candidates on their job site. And
Monster is only one of the top job boards. Nationwide, employers
spend over a billion dollars a year to recruit candidates from
job sites.
How likely you are to find your next job through the Internet
depends on a number of factors. One of them is the profession
you're in. Some studies have suggested nearly 50% or even more
of IT jobs are found online. For less tech-savvy positions, the
chance of finding your next job online are generally lower. If
most job seekers in your field are not tech-savvy, employers
will probably not bother looking online for those types of
candidates. For example, employers generally do not search the
Internet for low-wage job candidates like home health aides and
cashiers. The feeling is many of these people don't have
computers and aren't on the job sites.
In other professions, there is a quickly changing dynamic. When
job boards first became popular, most higher-level managers
still had their secretaries do most of their work. It was not
uncommon in 1997 for a CEO to spend little or no time on the
computer since it was seen as an administrative tool. By 2000,
that had started to change with many executives and other high
level managers starting to see e-mail and the web as a necessity
for doing their jobs and staying in touch with employees and
customers. Whereas recruiters had originally thought executives
would never look for jobs online, by 2002, a study by
outplacement firm Drake Beam Morrin reported 6% of
management-level jobs were found through the Internet in the
prior year. This statistic is continually increasing with more
and more management jobs being found online.
Even with the impressive growth of job boards, the top source
for finding a new job is still by word of mouth in most
professions. The 2002 Drake Beam Morrin study found 61% of
management-level jobs were found through networking. The
percentage tends to vary depending on the profession but usually
anywhere between 40% and 70% of positions are filled by word of
mouth. About 5% of jobs are still filled through newspaper ads.
Overall, across all professions, job boards account for about
10-15% of all jobs found.
Here are some tips to get the most out of using job boards:
1. When you post your resume on a job site, make sure the salary
you're asking for is in line with what other people with your
background are looking for. Think about it from the employer's
perspective: if you got a list of 50 resumes, and 45 of them are
asking for a salary you think is reasonable and 5 of them are
asking for a salary that seems high, which ones will you look at
first? How do you know what a reasonable salary is? One way is
to look at job listings for your profession in your local area
and make sure what you're asking for is within the range of what
employers are willing to pay.
2. Make sure recruiters can reach you easily at the contact
information you provide. The email address you put down on the
job boards should be one that you check frequently. Keep in mind
that with free email services like Yahoo and Hotmail, you have
to check them at least every few days if you're getting a decent
amount of email so they won't fill up. If a recruiter tries to
email you and their message bounces back because your mailbox
was full, chances are they'll just move on to the next person on
their list. Same goes for phone numbers. You should provide a
work or cell phone number so recruiters can reach you during the
day, as well as an evening phone number just in case they're
working late (as many recruiters do) or they brought some
resumes home with them. You should have an answering machine or
voice mail, and make sure it works properly. If you have a fax
machine on the same line, make sure it's set not to answer the
phone.
3. Make sure your resume is compelling. Your resume is your
representative. Would you hire someone to represent you if they
didn't look at least as professional as you yourself? Probably
not. Same goes for resumes. Make sure your resume is free of
spelling and grammatical errors (use the spelling and grammar
check in Microsoft Word). Make sure your resume is easy to read
and can be understood by a layman. If a busy recruiter has 50
resumes to look through on a job board and they can't understand
within the first 30 seconds of looking at your resume how you
can help their company, they'll just skip on to the next resume.
No one wants to work any harder than they have to.
4. Keep in mind there are many job boards used by recruiters.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket and rely on just one job
board. Post your resume on several sites. You can use a service
like PutMyResumeOnline.com which will do this for you.
PutMyResumeOnline.com will let you enter your resume once and
will then post it on over 90 job sites including Monster,
HotJobs, CareerBuilder and many more.
5. In the best case, you could have a 50% chance of finding a
job through a job board. In the worst case it could be as low as
10% or so. Knowing this, it makes sense to spend no more than
50% of the time you're allotting for job searching on using job
sites. Just like when you invest in the stock market, you should
diversify your portfolio and use several different job searching
methods. Talk to people and attend events, for one thing. Word
of mouth is the #1 way to find a job.
6. Don't think of job leads you get from job boards as just
potential jobs. Think of them also as Networking Leads. When you
get asked in for an interview after posting your resume or
responding to a job ad, go there with a networking mindset.
Regardless of whether you're meeting with a third party
recruiter or a direct employer, your approach should be to think
of opportunities to create a long-term relationship with the
company or individual. If you are looking for ways to help them
long-term -- whether it's referring friends to them or other
potential business -- they will start thinking of ways to help
you long term. They will also be more receptive to referring you
to someone else if they don't think the position is the right
fit for you.
7. Update your resume regularly on the most popular sites. Most
job sites receive less than 1,000 resumes per day, which spread
out across the thousands of counties in the U.S. does not amount
to an inordinate number. However, the top 3 job boards -
Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder - each receive 15,000 or more
resumes per day. On these three sites, your resume will start
appearing lower in the search results recruiters see after a
couple weeks. Therefore, we recommend logging in to each of
these 3 sites about twice a month and changing one or two words
in the resume so it will appear as if it's updated.
8. Get Noticed. If you see a position on a job board that you
feel is a good fit for you, make a conspicuous note of that in
the email you send with your resume. Consider coming up with a
headline for the message subject or the top of the email that
will get the recruiter's attention, like "LPN NURSE WITH 6 YEARS
EXPERIENCE WORKING IN HOSPITALS LIKE YOURS." A recruiter may get
100 responses or more to a job ad. They're more likely to look
at a resume if there's a personal note relevant to the specific
position. You can also consider faxing the resume with a service
like FaxMyResume.com to bypass the recruiter's inbox. One caveat
here: don't invest a lot of time with ALL the job ads you see -
just the best ones.