By Phil Blair
Not so long ago, searching for a job meant pounding the pavement. It meant long days of actually knocking on doors and hoping for a face-to-face interview. The latter is still the goal, but the job search these days is often a lot easier on shoe leather.
Modern employers increasingly rely on the Internet to recruit talent, especially in certain competitive skilled labor markets such as engineering and software programming. They are looking for you as much as you are looking for them. That makes it paramount that you supplement your job search with keyword Internet employment searches and online resume posting services.
Know this: computers don’t hire people, people hire people. Never rely on job boards to find you a job, but also never ignore them. They are free and increase the odds that your resume will be matched with compatible employers that are searching the job boards for employees with specific skills.
There are many resources online. Legitimate job search businesses, like my company, Manpower, offer a wide variety of services, from massive job databases that are searchable by criteria from skills to salary, resume clinics, cost-of-living calculators, networking exchanges, the latest interview trends and more.
Here are some job boards that are helpful to job seekers and their specific strength:
Job seekers can execute keyword searches, post resumes, research job fairs and peruse career advice. The “Discover Your Passion” tool helps you link your interests to possible careers.
A jobs-only search engine. Scans all current job listings from major job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages.
Job-matching technology scans your resume for keywords, remembers what you’ve searched for and collects details from jobs you’ve applied to.
A simple, one-step search site. Up to 500,000 jobs identified by keyword, location or both.
Resume postings and job searches by city.
Official site of the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management, a one-stop source for federal employment information.
Targets veterans, particularly those in high-tech fields.
This is the Wall Street Journal’s executive career site.
A government site that helps you determine skills and education necessary for different occupations.
Quint is short for quintessential. The site provides free college, career and job search content, plus tips, trends and coaching.
A useful A-Z index of job-hunting websites and services. It doesn’t post jobs or resumes, but points you to places that do.
More than 120 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities.
Widely used, no frills bulletin board for job opportunities. Online job boards, however, are just one tool in your job search kit. In good times, posting your resume on the web may prompt dozens of promising responses. In bad times, it might not solicit a single reaction.
The reason, of course, is competition. With millions of resumes circulating on the Internet, yours is likely to be a snowflake in a blizzard. According to one survey, the odds of getting a job through one of the big employment boards like Monster or CareerBuilder is less than two in 100.
And that’s if you do it right.. Limit the time you spend on job boards. No more than 20 percent of your search time should be spent in front of a computer. Let me stress this again: Computers don’t hire people, people hire people.
Phil Blair is the author of “Job Won! 500,000 Hires and Counting” (Author House, 2013). For more than three decades he has co-owned Manpower San Diego, the largest Manpower franchise in the U.S. His firm is San Diego’s fourth largest for-profit employer, providing approximately 3,500 jobs daily.