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Transcript
Slide No. 1
Hi. This is Marcia LaReau from Forward Motion. Welcome to this video on:
How to Find Job Opportunities on the Internet
Slide No. 2
I’ll be giving you some tips including:
Part 1: Where to search
Part 2: How to search
Part 3: Tracking and evaluating your results
Part 4: Adjusting your search
These tips can save you a lot of time in your search and help you find jobs that are the best match for your skills and experience.
Slide No. 3
Part 1: Where to search
For some people, looking for an employment opportunity on the internet has all the glamour of getting a root canal.
Slide No. 4
Since 2008, I’ve been asking jobseekers where they go to look for jobs. The answers don’t change much. Most everyone has heard of Career Builder and Monster. Those were clear leaders in 2008 before the Great Recession drove thousands of workers into unemployment.
Slide No. 5
There were so many people looking for work that hiring professionals, (like recruiters, and Human Resource professionals) turned to technology to help them find a way to look at all those resumes! Applicant Tracking Systems became important tools to help. That brought about new leaders in the industry.
Slide No. 6
As I mentioned earlier, most jobseekers were looking only on Monster and CareerBuilder. But let’s take a look at the top job boards. (I suggest that you duplicate this process for your job search and do this research in your industry.)
Back in 2011, many people in the supply chain industry were laid off. (Since people were not buying very many goods, it wasn’t necessary to make them or ship them across the country. So supply-chain managers were looking for a job. I wanted to find a way to tell when the industry was turning around.
So here is what I did.
I went to some of the most popular job boards including:
Click: Simply Hired
CLICK: Indeed
CLICK: and JuJu (which is a personal favorite.)
Indeed.com and Simply Hired are both aggregator job boards. That means that each night at a designated time, these software programs comb the Internet for job postings. They look at company websites, other job boards and all of the findings become part of the search results for that site. So you can find a lot of postings in one place.
(CLICK) I created a chart so I could watch what was happening over time.
The boards I used were: Career Builder, Monster, Simply Hired, Indeed, and Juju.
(CLICK) Using the term: “Supply-chain”, I recorded the number of jobs available in the U.S.
(CLICK) and those available in Connecticut, which is where my client base was located at that time.
Let’s compare a few of the results.
On January 21st, on Career Builder, there were 5,850 job openings in the U.S. and 81 in CT. On Monster.com there were over 1000 and 22 openings in CT. But look what happens when we go to the aggregator job boards. There were 53,404 jobs on Indeed.com and 66,558 on Simply Hired….and the number of jobs in CT were significantly higher as well. There is duplication in those numbers, but probably 100 at the very most. This is the result of using an aggregator job board.
So CareerBuilder and Monster are more limited in the options that are available to you.
You might ask which job board you should use. It’s a good question. As you watch your industry, you will likely find that positions that are a good fit are found on two or three of these primary search engines.
I also have to say that I look at Career Builder, Monster, and Juju because occasionally there will be something there that I don’t find anywhere else.
So I continued to watch these numbers every week and I realized that they weren’t changing very much and sometimes they were getting worse. The supply chain industry was still shrinking. I kept tracking the data and eventually I was able to see a trend.
On this chart we can see that the industry had it’s ups and downs. This is what I call the ebb and flow of the job search. There are times when there are a lot of positions open, and then it seems to hit a lull in activity. Jobseekers will tell me, “There’s nothing new out there.” Some of them even panic when that happens.
Back in 2011, the ebb and flow of positions in a particular industry might be 3 months. That means that there might be new postings for about six weeks in a row, followed by six weeks where the activity diminishes.
Today, in 2014, it’s a much better situation. The ebb and flow for industries may be as short as a month. So there are job postings for two weeks and then a lull in activity and then it picks up again.
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SLIDE No. 7
In addition to Aggregator Job Boards, there are, what I call, “Boutique” Job Boards. These are job boards that are specific to an industry, a role, or some other specific focus. Here are a few:
Suppose you are an technology professional, or you want to work in a non-profit, or perhaps you are in accounts receivable.
- IT
- Non-profit
- Accounts Receivable
The question is, “How do you find job boards that are specific to your job search?
(CLICK) Let’s go to your favorite search engine and look up: “Accounts Receivable jobs” and see what we get.
SLIDE No. 8
Here’s what I got:
Note the first pick. I’m looking here at the URL – “accountsreceivablejobs.org” …that’s a boutique job board
The second search result shows us that our search engine went to monster.com and looked up our search terms for us. So that isn’t a boutique job board.
The same happened on simply hired and on careerbuilder.
But the fourth entry here is “accounts-receivable-jobs.jobcircle.com. That’s worth investigating.
You might wonder why these positions might be on these smaller job boards. Remember that with so many jobseekers, hiring professionals are looking for possible ways to reduce the number of applicants. They are counting on the fact that only the most savvy jobseekers will be looking for these smaller boards.
(SLIDE No. 9)
So let’s review: Where to Search
- The primary Job Boards we discussed
- Boutique Job boards (and don’t forget)
- Company job boards – You can access them from the company website. Usually under a link named, “Careers.”
This is the end of Part 1. In Part 2, we will discuss how to search these job boards to find jobs that fit.
END PART 1.
