How to Use a Job Board to Find a Job - Part I of VI
Job boards have been around almost since the dawn of the Internet and became popular in the mid-1990's with the birth of some of today's biggest and best job boards. They're wonderful tools for both job seekers and employers yet like all tools can be dangerous in the hands of someone who misuses them. The following are tips for those who want to use job boards in a way that will maximize their chances of finding a great new job as quickly as possible:
Come, Use, Go Away
Although I'm the President and Founder of job board CollegeRecruiter.com and therefore have a vested interest in getting job seekers to use job boards, I also recognize that far too many job seekers spend far too much time on job boards. There are some 50,000 job boards that primarily serve candidates in the United States and another 50,000 that primarily serve candidates elsewhere. No one can use all or even most of them. And don't even try to use many of them. '
Just about every job seeker will be well served by using the big three general boards (Careerbuilder, Monster, and HotJobs), two or three niche boards which target your occupational field or experience level, and two or three niche boards which target your geographic preferences. One great way of finding good niche boards are to search Google or Yahoo and seeing which job boards come up first. If you're looking for entry level jobs, type in "entry level jobs." If you're looking for engineering jobs, type in "engineering jobs." Another great way is to look at the sites which are members of the International Association of Employment Web Sites as these sites tend to be larger, well established, and have agreed to a set of ethical principals.
Once you find the general and niche sites that best fit your interests, go to each of them, register by posting your resume, apply to all of the advertised jobs which are qualified and which are of interest to you, set up job match agents (sometimes called alerts) and then go away and don't come back until you receive an emailed alert telling you about a job which is of interest to you has just been posted. You should spend at most one day on the job boards and then at most an hour a week after that.
(continued tomorrow)
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