Searching For A New Career

We all know of the major online job searches; Monster.com, Careerbuilder, and Yahoo Hotjobs. There are even some others growing in popularity like America's JobBank, but there is often a more direct and convenient approach to find your dream job. Or just a new one.

If you have a general idea of whom you would like to work for, the best way is to go to that specific company's website and find the section regarding careers. The career link is usually posted in small print at the bottom of the page, or you may have to find the "About Us" section to navigate to the career section. This all depends on the type of firm and how badly they want you to find the career section. The companies that post their own jobs are generally medium to large sized corporations and typically use a third party program such as Brassring, Taleo, or Peoplesoft. You can easily browse the available positions, however if you would like to apply to one or more job opening you will be required to create an account. The accounts can be created for free and most give you the opportunity to create an online profile so they have your resume stored in their database. Naturally if you are going to do this for several corporations, it tends to take a fair amount of time so clear your schedule for the next couple days. Some companyies use a service called RealResume that allows you to upload your Microsoft Word version of your resume "as is", which needless to say, saves a great deal of time and preserves your unique resume style. The time consuming part is when you have to individually enter all specific information in sections (work experience, education, cover letter, etc...), so that the potential future employer has everyone's resume in the same format. So before you begin, make sure you have an exact copy of your Word resume and cover letter in plain text format, and that it looks as "presentable" as a plain text resume can look. This will save you a great deal of time.

The specialized job sites such as Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs (to name a few) are very popular, but you often have to sift through all the bogus "Make $8,000 a week from your home computer" type postings. Trust me, if you could easily make that much money working from home, those companies wouldn't have to advertise their openings because people would be standing in line. This isn't to say that these sites aren't worth checking; there are very real and attainable postings listed. Careerbuilder is nice because you can specify which type of work your looking for, and they will send you daily listings by locations of your choice about newly posted openings. It will also tell you in a job search if you've already applied for the position. This is a handy feature because Hotjobs tends to continually repeat their openings almost every day making it difficult to discern if a position is new, or if you already applied for it a week ago. However Careerbuilder is the worst in allowing those "$8000 a month" postings that don't really amount to anything.

A few other handy services such as SimplyHired.com and Indeed.com, allow you to specify a location and the crawl all postings from various sources that relate to jobs in your area. They not only pull postings from the other job sites but from companies as well, enabling you to quickly gain a broader scope of what is available. The only downside is that they naturally can't crawl everything available (but come darn close), and some of the jobs posted are slightly outdated. Overall these are extremely helpful resources.

But lets not forget the trusty newspaper. Most local newspapers now have a website with a section under their classifieds for local jobs. You'll find that most small to medium sized businesses will still only put an ad in the paper because their website doesn't generate enough traffic to support a career section, and it is incredibly cheaper than to list an opening on a "job website". Hopefully, your newspaper offers this service for free, most do, but be wary of those that make you register before you can view the listings. They tend to take your email address and sell it to help fund the project and if that's the case, save yourself the grief and drive down to the convenience store an pay the $.50 for a newspaper.

So whether you've been fired, laid off, quit, job hunting, or just looking for a career change, check your online resources. This is usually your best bet to find the job your looking for.