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Job Seekers Use Job Boards Because Job Boards Work — Weddle

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January 27, 2011


Peter WeddleWhy does such a high percentage of job seekers use job boards when you keep seeing stories that the vast majority of job openings go unadvertised and that only a small percentage of job seekers find jobs through job boards like CollegeRecruiter.com? Could it be that those stories are wrong?
“Job boards work,” writes career expert Peter Weddle. “Not as a substitute for all of the other things you must do to find employment today, but as a critically important complement. Said another way, you ignore job boards at your own peril.” How can Peter make such a claim? Unlike a lot of other pundits, he’s actually done his research. WEDDLE’s has been polling job seekers since 1996 on what strategies work best in a job search. Last year, almost 2,000 people responded to the poll. Here are the top five ways they found their last job:

  • 35.4 percent applied to a job posting or posted their resume on a job board;
  • 8.5 percent got a tip from a friend;
  • 6.8 percent received a call from a headhunter;
  • 6.6 percent replied to an ad in a newspaper; and
  • 4.9 percent were referred by a friend who was an employee of the company.

Some would argue that tips from friends and referrals are both types of networking. Even if we accept that argument, and not all would, networking still comes at 15.1 percent and therefore second to the 35.4 percent who found a job through a job board.
There are 50,000 job boards in the U.S. and another 50,000 in other countries. No one should use more than a handful or two of job boards in their search so everyone needs help in greatly narrowing that list. I recommend to college students and recent graduates that they use CollegeRecruiter.com and perhaps one other college job board, two boards which focus on their geographic niche, two boards which focus on their occupational niche, and the three, big general boards of Monster, Careerbuilder, and HotJobs. You can find the niche boards by typing into Google your desired niche, such as jobs in Nevada or engineering jobs and then using the sites which come up high in the search results. Another way is to pick up a copy of Peter’s 2009/10 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet.

Originally posted by Steven Rothberg

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