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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- My Perfect Gig, "a members-only, private career network for engineering professionals where companies and talented individuals speak a 'common language.'" (We've heard other anecdotal evidence of job-seekers finding success on paid, private job boards.)
- Vitruva, "a second-generation career website powered by an artificial intelligence job-matching engine." The Vitruva site says it "connect[s] talented professionals with highly qualified job opportunities instantly - in real-time." You can also upload your LinkedIn profile to Vitruva.
- Jobzerk, which bills itself as the "world's first community and socially driven job site."
- OneWire, a site for finance professionals that "allows individuals to quickly and precisely map their experiences - education, work, and life - and distinguish themselves from their peers." The site goes on to note that "firms use the same system to create a search for their ideal candidate. This mirroring of profile and search criteria allows for the precise matching of individual to opportunity."
Employers and recruiters are also deploying novel online approaches to locating the best candidates. The "War for Talent" is pushing employers and recruiters to use or create new models to find good workers.
One is TopCoder, which offers weekly competitions for software programmers, the partial purpose of which are to help employers "determine which candidate is best suited to the needs of your organization," the site states. "While certification has offered some credibility, the Web-page text continues, "competitions that test a developer's skills in real-world challenges go much further to differentiating one candidate from another."
The bottom-line question in using job boards is this: Would you rather compete on a playing field where employers are overwhelmed with the sheer numbers of resume submissions -- or in less competitive venues, such as networking situations, where you have more chance of standing out and impressing a prospective employer? As this chapter emphasizes, job boards are still part of the job-seeker's toolkit. But the rest of this book describes Web 2.0 techniques that can help you stand out to employers.
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