Career Search Engines and Job Search Engines

Career search engines and job search engines are the way that most people today try to find a new job. The trouble is, you can spend a ton of time surfing the Web and applying for jobs through career search engines and job search engines and experience so little success, it feels like you are sending applications into a big Internet void! If you do this long enough, you are putting yourself at risk for a whole lot of frustration and depression. So if you are going to use the Web to search for and apply for jobs, here are some suggestions to do it well to maximize your odds of success:

1. Start with the huge but general job search sites. GeekSugar.com recently evaluated job search sites and published this list of the 10 best online job search sites. QuintCareers.com offers a slightly different opinion of the top 10 best job search Web sites. Of all the job search Web sites in the above lists, my personal favorite is Indeed.com. Because these career search engines and job search engines have such large databases and contain so many listings that are irrelevant to you that would take time to sort through, the best thing to do is to set up a personal search agent to do the hunting for you. Personal agents can email you when job postings are published that match specific criteria that you tell it. You can search by job title, keywords in the job description, and/or geography. Try experimenting with different searches to discover which criteria cause you to receive the best job postings for your needs.

2. Next, use niche job search sites. Eric Shannon compiled a nice list of the top 100 niche job search sites. I like his list as a good start but you should also become proficient with how to do a Google search. For example, Mr. Shannon's list doesn't include my field, psychology. So if I use Google with the search term...

psychology jobs

...Google quickly identifies PsychologyJobs.com, PsycCareers, and PhDs.org as three terrific sites to find jobs in psychology.

It is also a good idea to do a search using a term like...

psychology careers

A search term using "careers" rather than "jobs" may give you more general career info than job listings but it might also lead you to additional good niche job search sites suggested in the content giving more general career advice.

3. Set up a profile on LinkedIn and ask at least two colleagues to critique it for you. Then find at least three people who can give you excellent references on LinkedIn because recruiters tell me that they value more highly candidates who have at least three references on their profile. When you are creating your profile, make sure that you are clear in your career focus so that recruiters and hiring managers don't have to guess what you can do and what you want. If you don't know what you want to do, take a step back and figure it out before you try to launch a scattered job search campaign.

4. The major professional association for your career field is often a wonderful resource for job postings and career advice. For example, one of the best resources for trainers is the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The association for chemical engineers is AIChE. Often a professional association Web site will have a job listings section and these jobs will be highly targeted for a specific career field. There is usually a window of time where this is the only place these jobs will be advertised before the spider-type job search engines like Indeed.com find the job postings.

5. An excellent new career development resource is Chimby.com. Chimby is an advice career search engine that scans 400 career advice Web sites to bring you lots of information on specific topics of interest to you. This site is more helpful for career planning and decision-making rather than finding job openings, but if you are feeling stuck in your job search, re-evaluating your job search strategies can be a better use of your time than continuing to hunt for more job ads.

6. Spend about 10 hours per week online and spend the rest of your time connecting in person with as many people as possible. Some people mistakenly think that Internet technology has completely changed the way job search works but it has not done so. Human nature has not changed. If a hiring manager has 600 applications submitted online and a trusted colleague asks him/her to review the application of a specific person, the hiring manager will gladly do so and will likely hope that this person's qualifications look excellent so that there will be a good reason not to carefully review all the other 600 applications!

Hope you find a fabulous new job or career! If one of these suggestions works for you, please let us know!