Free Job Posting Options Slowly Taking Root

A question was recently posted to one of the discussion lists operated by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The college career service office professional started by writing that she remembers from the Golden Parachute books that about 10 percent of job openings were advertised and then asked if that number was still correct.
I suspect that the percentages must be far higher now because virtually every organization of any size has a web site and the cost of publishing a job to those web sites is essentially zero. In addition, there are a number of high traffic job board which accept postings for free, including Indeed, SimplyHired, and most of the Craigslist sites. Then there are sites such as LinkUp, which takes postings from many corporate employer sites and aggregates them so they’re all available in one place. Of course, virtually every posting everywhere is also a click away at search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In addition, employers who want to post their jobs to CollegeRecruiter.com may now choose to pay $175 for 60 days or pay only when they receive qualified applications under our new pay-per-resume job posting option.
My best guess is that about 75 percent of job openings are now advertised, although many of those are advertised for free. From the perspective of the candidate, whether a job posting is paid for or free isn’t very important.

Ask the Experts: Answering Great Questions from Job Seekers

One of the pleasures of managing a team of talented, dedicated employees is seeing one of their ideas take root and flourish. Case in point: content coordinator Candice Arnold recommended that we resurrect our Ask the Experts questions and answers feature using our blogging software and integrating it with our customer relationship management software, Salesforce.com.
Candice’s vision was quite an upgrade over how we used to do it: email the questions to the couple of dozen experts, receive their answers back in the bodies of their emails and sometimes attachments, copy and paste their answers into html templates, and upload the web pages. The entire process took hours for our staff and the experts. The new process has saved everyone a ton of time and led to a ton of great answers by the experts who choose to address the questions being asked by students searching for internships, recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs, alumni, and employers.
Each week, Candice sends out an email through Salesforce to the experts who have agreed to answer questions. None answer all of them. Some answer a lot and others answer a few. The choice is theirs. Here’s the email that Candice sent earlier today:

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Career Resources for Ex-Convicts

Question from Career Counselor:
I am talking with someone with a lot of academic and career potential about what career path he would like to take, but he does not want to pursue additional education if all of his opportunities are blocked by his criminal record. Are there books or other resources I could look into in order to properly advise him?
Thanks!
Brian J. Pillsbury, Ph.D.
Career Services
Northern Illinois University