This week’s job tip tells about expanding your searching to be more than just looking at Monster day after day. It’s surprising, but for lots of people they rely on Monster (or Careerbuilder) to uncover their next job for them. Unluckily, in today’s job market that’s just not enough. To be able to find all of the options available, you’re going to need to dig deeper and work somewhat harder. At some point, it seems like practically all jobs end up in the internet (somewhere). The difficulty is where to look to find them.
The big search engines (like Monster and Careerbuilder) are solid resources that provide a lot of information - almost all of it at no cost. However, many jobs don’t finish up there. Why? Well, foremost, employers must pay to place positions on these sites. If they have 50 openings, it might not be affordable to put all 50 on Monster.com. Rather they could pay to post just a few of the critical or high-profile positions on a big search engine. The remaining positions they could post at a regional/local or less expensive search engine. This is more true for a smaller sized company without the resources to post and finance all of their openings. All the jobs will be available (obviously) on the companies own webpage since that's free.
Yet another issue is that there’s not risk or cost for an applicant to apply for open positions. They may or may not hold the required experience or credentials for the work. Many employers experience a literal flood of resumes which can be nearly impossible to sift through to find the truly qualified applicants. This also discourages employers for posting on big search engines. Again, this may be possibly more true for smaller employers (where the vast majority of jobs are found).
Test this sometime. Pick a big and small employer in your town and locate their Career webpages. Note the number of jobs and then attempt to find all these jobs on Monster or Careerbuilder. When we tried it we found that merely a percentage were posted. If we were looking for that given opening, we would have been out of luck.
So remember - Monster is a great site with a lot of jobs and data, but make sure to look past it and branch out into other areas to find your next job. Try other search engines, check out your newspaper, and go to the employer’s own web site to uncover all the jobs. Good luck!
Your Weekly Job Search Tip: Look Beyond Monster