Beyond Monster.com - where are the best jobs listed in your community?

Up until a few years ago, looking for a job meant scanning the help wanted section of your local newspaper.

Then, in 1999, Monster.com was created and marketed as the newest and best way to search for a job. With its turbo-charged database, it allowed professionals to quickly search for specific jobs in local communities across the nation. For job seekers and employers looking for skilled talent, it was an online matchmaking service whose time had come.

Soon, other national online job search sites appeared. Sites like Hotjobs, Career Builder, Jobing and others touted new and different job seeking services. Today, there are an estimated 40,000 online job sites!

So what happened? The Monsters of the world ended up becoming (quite literally) ‘Monsters’!

Consider that Monster.com today claims to serve over 63 million job seekers every month. At any one time, there are 1 million jobs listed on their site and over 150 million resumes in their database.

When competing against millions of others, job seekers are sensing that their resumes are being lost in the shuffle and employers are finding that the costs and inefficiencies of sorting through thousands of resumes outweigh any once perceived value of these large job sites.

As a result, savvy job seekers and discerning employers began shying away from these massive websites and paying attention to smaller, niche websites that are targeted towards the best local talent in specific career sectors.
So where do employers post their jobs to get the best talent? Where are job seekers going to find the best jobs in their communities?

Here’s a few tips.

Go to the source! The most accessible job opportunities are the ones listed on a specific company’s website. To research or identify businesses that might be of interest to you, visit the website of your local chamber of commerce or through your local business publications. Your local workforce development offices also provide good data on specific companies as does your local library. If looking for a career in a local or state government agency, go to your city or state’s website. For jobs in federal agencies, go to the federal government’s official jobs website at www.usajobs.com.

Niche online job sites – To find a website that lists the best available jobs for your career sector in your community, requires some research. Many times, these job boards are run by local or national associations but in other cases, they are run by entrepreneurs who are able to offer lower posting costs to local companies and effectively target local professionals. Check with colleagues and peers, your local associations or with friends who are in human resources who will tell you where they post jobs to find the best candidates.

Job aggregator sites – These sites send out high tech ‘spiders’ to collect jobs across the Internet and allow you to search and sort the jobs you are looking for by key words and location. They pull these jobs from company websites, from other popular job search sites, associations and other resources. These sites include www.indeed.com and www.simplyhired.com. While sometimes there navigation is clunky due to the high volume of jobs, they are highly efficient in terms of grabbing the most up-to-date jobs listed on a company’s or a job search website. 

LinkedIn – If you are a job seeker or are simply managing your career opportunities, you need to create a professional profile on LinkedIn.com . Your profile on LinkedIn is very similar to an online resume, but it also allows you to add professional recommendations from other LinkedIn professionals and corporate recruiters use LinkedIn to search profiles for talent. In addition, you can join a LinkedIn networking group in which you can communicate with your peers and gain valuable job seeking tips. LinkedIn is also a valuable tool to research key executives at companies you are thinking of applying.

Social networking websites – On Facebook, you will find Facebook groups that specifically target job seekers in specific industries. On Facebook groups, search for key terms and you are likely to find tremendous resources for your job hunt. In addition, you can track down former colleagues, clients, college classmates and other acquaintances who can assist in your networking strategies.

Twitter is one of the newest online social networking tools. Allowing users to send short (140 character) messages to their ‘followers’, many folks are twittering career info and new jobs postings as they become available.

One last piece of advice: as a job seeker, be very leery of having to ‘pay’ a website to access listed jobs. Some companies try to get you to ‘subscribe’ with the promise of getting the ‘best’ or ‘highest paying six-figure’ jobs, but in fact, these sites can’t deliver a lot that you can’t find on your own. In addition, be very careful of job listings for ‘confidential clients.’ Many times, these companies post these ‘jobs’ as a ruse to get you to purchase access to their bogus job listing services.