Where to Look

You may be thinking about using the Internet to help you in your quest for a new job. If not, you should. Maybe this will persuade you: in 1998, there were over 28 million jobs posted on the Internet. That number includes Job Boards, Corporate Web sites, and Usenet (1999 Electronic Recruiting Index, Interbiznet.com, 1998). According to Job Searching Online for Dummies by Pam Dixon, 17,000 new jobs are posted online each week and employers and recruiters use the Web to make 48percent of all hires.

As you can see, employers and recruiters are making good use of the Internet and so should you. This article will help you learn how to use the Net as a job search tool. Since you are reading this article it's obvious that you are already using the Internet to help you with some of your career planning needs. You may even be using it to search for a job already. My goal is to help you make _full use_of what this amazing tool has to offer.

Job Listings

While many of you may be familiar with the general employment sites, such as Monster.com and TrueCareers, you may not be as familiar with niche sites. Niche sites are those sites that specialize in a particular industry or profession, such as AlliedNet, for those looking for jobs in healthcare, or OnlineSports.com Job Listings for those looking for jobs in the sports industry. Or perhaps you are looking for a job in government. Did you know that many federal, state, provincial, and local government jobs are listed online? Many companies list their job openings on their corporate Web sites. You can easily find those sites by using any search engine. Another great resource is FlipDog.com, which gathers job listings from company Web sites.

In addition, newspapers often publish their classified ads on the Web. You can access those listings for free. Local employment sites provide help to those who are limiting their search to a specific geographic region and are especially useful to those who are relocating.

Résumé Banks⁵⁹

Then there are résumé banks, which allow you to post your résumé on a database which is accessed by recruiters and employers. Many of the sites that list jobs also have résumé banks. To list your résumé you will have to fill out a form with your employment history, skills, etc. Some résumé banks allow you to cut and paste your actual résumé into the form. For that you will need an ASCII⁶⁰ résumé, which is simply your résumé without all the fancy formatting. That ASCII résumé will also come in handy when you respond to job announcements via email, or when a company requests a scannable résumé. A scannable résumé is one that can be scanned into an electronic résumé database or an electronic résumé tracking system. Both are commonly used by employers and recruiters.

About.com Job Search Guide Alison Doyle has also put together a list of sites on which you can post your résumé.

⁵⁹. Résumé: Also spelt résume, resumé or resume. Curriculum Vitae (CV), usually no larger than two printed pages. ↩

⁶⁰. ASCII: In the context, the author means “Plain (Simple) Text Résumés”. ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), pronounced /’æski/. Character encoding based on the (American, US) English alphabet. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed; 94 are printable characters (excluding the space). Non-US symbols, such as ₤, €, or Ñ, among others, are excluded. ↩