Today's Online Job Search Tip

This week’s job tip tells about broadening your online job search to be more than just looking at Monster every single day. It’s surprising, but for lots of people they rely on Monster (or Careerbuilder) to identify their next job for them. Unluckily, in today’s job market that’s just not enough. In order to find all of the options available, you’re going to need to dig deeper and work a little harder. At some point, it seems like practically all jobs end up in the world wide web (somewhere). The difficulty is where to look to find them.

The big search engines (like Monster and Careerbuilder) are excellent resources that offer a lot of information - almost all of it at no cost. However, many jobs don’t show up there. Why? Well, foremost, employers must pay to put positions on those sites. If they have 50 openings, it might not be economical to put all 50 on Monster. Rather they may pay to post just a few of the critical or high-profile positions on a big search engine. The remaining positions they may post at a regional/local or less expensive search engine. This is even more true for a smaller company without the resources to post and procure all of their openings. All the jobs would be available (of course) on the companies own webpage since that is free.

Another issue is that there’s not risk or cost for an applicant to apply for open positions. They may or may not have the required experience or credentials for the work. Many employers experience a literal flood of resumes which can be nearly impossible to sift through to find the truly qualified applicants. This also hinders employers for posting on big search engines. Again, this can be probably more true for smaller employers (where the vast majority of jobs are found).

Test this sometime. Pick a big and small employer in your town and locate their Career web pages. Note the number of jobs and then attempt to find all these jobs on Monster or Careerbuilder. When we tried it we found that only a percentage were posted. If we were looking for that individual opening, we would have been out of luck.

So remember - Monster is an excellent site with plenty of jobs and facts, but be sure you look past it and branch out into other areas to find your next job. Try other search engines, look in your newspaper, and go to the employer’s own web site to seek out all the jobs. Best wishes!