I have been looking for work for several months and have used most of the well known sites, i. e., Monster, Career Builder, Indeed, Job.com, and others. I’ve used a lot of job boards directly from companies and miscellaneous job boards which can only be described as “wannabe’s”. I’ve also had interviews with companies listing their jobs on Craigslist.
One of the most difficult things about online job boards is finding a description of the work you do so that you will be able to see jobs for which you are qualified and that fit your preferences and experience. An incredible amount of time can be wasted looking at jobs selected by “job alerts” that have no relevance whatever.
I have a couple of great examples of this relevance issue. The funniest one is the alert I had for a job as one of those “human sign boards” during tax season. I really did some soul searching on that to learn what I had in my resume that made this seem like a great opportunity for me. The second was for a job as “Account Manager”. Let’s just say the job was grossly misrepresented on line and by phone and I only got the real information by my pointed questions during the interview…an interview that took 30 minutes to get to and 30 minutes back, 40 miles of gas, and only 15 minutes of conversation.
A “wanna be” job board is one that appears to be just trolling other job boards and re-posting jobs. In the meantime, they are loading their job site with job searching “tools” that you just “MUST” have to find a job; tools that they can provide for a fee. Resume writing is the most popular but other offerings include consultants, background checks, and eBooks with job search tips.
A word of caution about the information you provide at these job boards… Someone working with your resume, your name, your phone number, your email address, maybe your date of birth and a list of all the places you have worked over the last 10 to 15 years can come very close to performing identity theft against you. All they need to do is call you, ask for more information, talk about the job, set up an interview. Then they ask you to complete an application and submit it prior to the interview “to save time” and they will have the rest of the information they need.
Another concern is credential theft. A resume that has some hefty experience in a particular field and the credentials to support that experience can be useful to the unscrupulous.
Many companies posting jobs on line these days are doing what they call “a group interview”. They take several candidates in one large room. They require them to complete all applications and background check permission forms. Once the documents are completed, an individual comes into the room and explains the job in detail, sometimes making it sound like a very grim job. Candidates basically eliminate themselves and leave rather than move forward to a “personal interview”. In the meantime, this company has all that important data on these people (Date of Birth, Social Security Number, Driver’s License Number, Address, Phone) plus permission to do a background check. Personally, I don’t generally provide my social security number until the day I’m hired.
Some excellent but usually small employers will print a resume from a job board to do an interview. I don’t list names of companies I have worked for in the online resumes and provide only an email address for contact. These small employers will express concern that information about previous employers is not available online. Taking several copies of a formal and complete resume to the interview solves this problem. In my opinion, these employers do not have much turnover and thus are naïve about the security of information posted on job boards. Usually a brief statement about identity theft and security takes care of their concerns.
In my opinion, Monster does the best job of providing job descriptions and search tools to help the candidate find the applicable listings. Career Builder has many very good job listings but a great many re-posts of the same job plus posts a lot of MLM and Work at Home listings. Job.com and Indeed.com also do a good job. As for Craigslist, I interviewed with one employer who had posted his job opening on Craigslist. They were a reasonably substantial company but this employer stated they used Craigslist because it was free compared to the other job boards. He told me more about his company in that sentence than he did in the next 15 minutes.
The job boards are less useful and reliable for the employee in our current economy than they were in a more stable economy. As we’ve already learned, finding a job today takes a great deal more patience than in the past plus we need to be on guard against the fake and unscrupulous job posters.
