Quintessential Careers Press:
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media
Chapter 2: Making the Best of Job Boards While They Are Still Around
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Although job boards are clearly on the way out -- or at least morphing significantly -- enough employers and recruiters are still using them that it's still important to know the best ways to use them. You can implement the Web 2.0 techniques outlined in the rest of this book, but you'll want to include job boards in your current strategy. Thus, here is some guidance:
Job-board Tips for Job-seekers
- Be selective in zapping your resume to employers. Don't indiscriminately resume-spam employers where vacancies don't even exist. Some job-seekers seem to think they'll have greater success if they blanket the Internet with their resumes. Indeed, resume "spammers" who bombard employers with applications and resumes continue to make Internet job-hunting more difficult for all other job-seekers. A survey by resumedoctor.com revealed that 92 percent of surveyed companies are overwhelmed with hundreds of irrelevant responses to job openings. Other findings show that 63 percent of job-seekers "blast" unsolicited resumes, and more than 70 percent of applications do not even match the job description. Moreover, 34 percent of applicants fail to follow specific resume submission instructions outlined in the job posting.
- Use company career sites sites.
Those who are interested in working for a Fortune 500 company will find that the majority of the available
positions with those firms are listed in the careers section of company Web sites. Robyn Greenspan reports
that almost all sectors have seen growth in the adoption rate of corporate Web site recruiting. A full
100 percent of companies in the healthcare sector use corporate Web sites for recruiting, for example,
as do high percentages of companies in manufacturing, high tech, the consumer sector, transportation,
wholesale, natural resources, the financial sector, and utilities.
Huge numbers of job-seekers use them -- but are increasingly demanding an informative (even entertaining), and smoothly operating "candidate experience." Increasingly, candidates expect these sites to help them determine where they want to interview and work, and at least a quarter of them will reject companies based on unappealing or hard-to-use Web sites. Talent gurus are thus encouraging employers to enhance their company career portals. Still, Buss cites the statistic that 90 percent of visitors to corporate career sites don't apply, and even among those who start applying, at least half don't finish.
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