Understanding Online Job Search Resources by Gary Capone, president, Palladian International LLC., in collaboration with APICS The Association for Operations Management ExEcUTivE SUmmaRy There is a wealth of information available to help with a job search. So much, in fact, the challenge is often learning how to deal with the volume of information. There are tens of thousands of job boards and millions of company sites, networking sites, and research tools. Compiling a list of all the resources would take a lifetime - and the information would be out of date within hours of starting the process. In 2009, every day nearly 130,000 new Web sites were created, 120,000 blogs were started, 165,000 people joined Facebook, 83 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, and 400 million videos were watched on YouTube. And remember, these are daily figures. On the job search front, there are individual sites listing more than two million jobs. There is a myth that a “hidden job market” exists. The truth is almost every job is posted online. It costs a company almost nothing to add a job to its Web site. Companies want to hire the best people and advertise positions accordingly. In addition, a company that doesn’t advertise a job runs the risk of being accused of discriminatory hiring practices. There are very few situations where a company will keep a hiring need confidential. When companies want to maintain some confidentiality, they will often post jobs anonymously or work with a recruiter who will advertise the job without disclosing the company name. The challenge is not the availability of information. The challenge is being able to find, assess, and act on the information efficiently. Palladian | APICS 1 UndERSTanding OnlinE JOb SEaRch RESOURcES In this white paper: Executive Summary 1 Sites for Corporate Search 14 Overview 3 The Company Web Site 14 Public Companies 14 Job Boards 4 Hoovers 15 Message Boards 15 Big Job Boards 4 Answer Sites 15 Other General Job Boards 5 Warnings 16 Specialty Job Boards 5 Regional Job Boards 5 Sites for Job Search Advice 17 The Strategy 6 APICS 17 Job Aggregators 7 Job Boards 17 Quintessential Careers 17 Alerts 8 Secrets of the Job Hunt 18 The Strategy 8 LinkedIn Answers 18 Google 18 Networking Sites 9 Which Advice to Trust 18 Expert Assistance 19 Stigma 9 What Can Your Network Do? 9 Sites Mentioned in the Report 20 The Tools 10 LinkedIn 11 About Palladian and APICS 21 How to Use LinkedIn 12 Palladian | APICS 2 OvERviEW in this guide, we are going to review a variety of resources available online to help your job search. Many will be familiar to you and some are likely to be new. Each resource is a tool and can do a specific job in your job search. To be effective, you will need to use multiple resources. Pinning your hopes on a single site will not maximize your effectiveness. In addition, trying to hit every site is impossible. We will give you a roadmap for how to approach a search as efficiently as possible using a wide range of tools. Job boards – The most common tool job seekers use are job boards. We will outline a few you should consider (and probably already are using). More important than which sites to use, we will show you how to build a strategy to use job boards effectively. Job aggregators – These sites pull job postings from thousands of sites and republish the information. They offer an extremely efficient way to search for jobs, and we will show you how to integrate job aggregators into your search strategy. networking Sites – Everyone talks about the importance of networking in a job search. Most people do a poor job of networking, if they do any networking at all. We will show you a few sites and techniques to make your networking efficient and effective. corporate Research Sites – You need to do your homework on the companies you are pursuing. This will help you tailor your approach to the company’s values, goals, and needs, and in turn, improve your chances of getting hired. We will show you some resources to make this research process quick and easy. Job Search advice – You will have questions during your search and will need to develop new skills. Resume writing and interviewing are not skills that we are born with. You need to work and practice to master them. Having a good source for advice can be an invaluable resource, and we will show you a few places to turn. Palladian | APICS 3 JOb bOaRdS The first Web sites job seekers turn to when starting a search are the job boards. Job boards show the jobs companies are actively advertising. It would be great if we could just scan the ads, pick a job, and go to work. Getting hired is a lot tougher than that. Scanning job postings does offer a significant benefit to your search. You will find real opportunities that are a suitable match for your goals. You will also gain information about the job market. Picking the job boards you will want to track can be a difficult decision. There are too many to try to go to all of them. You need to be very selective. Knowing how companies advertise their job postings can help you prioritize which sites to watch. When a company decides to fill a position, they want to find the best person, as fast as possible, while spending the least amount of money and time. In other words, they want to be efficient. For some companies, this is easy. The largest, most respected companies have tens of thousands of job seekers who visit their sites daily to check the job postings. For the other millions of businesses, life is tougher. They have to find advertising mechanisms that are efficient and effective. There was a time when the most efficient ads were in newspapers. Today, newspaper subscriptions have dropped and fewer people read the paper. The cost of posting jobs in newspapers has continued to be high. This has propelled the shift to online advertising, where the costs can be much lower while reaching a much wider audience. Job boards offer companies a way to post their jobs. Most companies operate a company job board, posting the positions they have on their company Web site. This can be effective, especially for very large well-known companies. For many firms, the company Web site doesn’t generate the traffic needed to ensure a large pool of candidates. Even the best known companies struggle to find enough candidates through their corporate Web site. To find additional candidates, companies look to other Web sites. big Job boards It is very likely you have visited the big job sites – Monster and CareerBuilder are the largest. Because of the volume of traffic they generate, these sites are some of the most expensive for employers. The sites also offer significant volume discounts. The cost of postings has led a large number of employers, typically small and mid-sized companies, to pick their primary posting site. The result is a different mix of jobs between these big job boards. There are some duplicates, but if you are only looking at one of the sites, you will be missing out on a lot of positions that only appear on the other site. Palladian | APICS 4 JOb bOaRdS Other general Job boards After Monster and CareerBuilder, there are a number of sites trying to gain market share and become one of the dominant job boards. Hot Jobs, Jobs.com, and numerous others still offer employers exposure, but to a lesser extent. Some of these sites have discounted their postings to be more attractive to employers. This does two things – it boosts the number of employers using the site (a good thing), and it encourages less valuable positions to be posted (a bad thing). These less valuable positions can even include the “get rich quick schemes” and the “work from home” jobs that are really small business startups you need to fund yourself. For many job seekers looking for full-time employment, these postings are a distraction. Specialty Job boards After the general job boards, there are a wide range of specialty job boards. For operations and supply chain careers, APICS is one of the largest. So, how can the APICS Career Center (www.apicscareercenter.org) with approximately 135 jobs compare to CareerBuilder with more than 100,000 jobs? A site like APICS offers a way to target your search to the specific type of jobs you want. If you are in the health care field, an IT professional, an accountant, or sales professional, APICS isn’t going to help your search. You are only going to find production management, production control, materials management, and other similar positions. This specialization offers a very efficient way to search. You know the jobs on a specialty site will be close to your goals. Another benefit of the APICS site is that the companies advertising on the site value the knowledge gained through APICS training and certifications. They are choosing the site to advertise because they want experienced APICS members. Other companies, who don’t value APICS, won’t post on the site. Companies choose to use specialty sites to improve their efficiency. A big job board may produce hundreds of candidates for each job posting. Unfortunately, most of these candidates will be well outside the requirements of the position. It is so easy for a candidate to fire off a resume; some candidates apply to anything that sounds interesting. A specialty site cuts down on the number of completely unqualified submissions since only people in the career field are likely to visit the site. Regional Job boards One other category of job boards includes regional sites focused on a specific geographic area. There are thousands of sites dedicated to a city, region, or state. These sites will only post jobs located within their territory. Some of the sites are run by community groups and charge very low fees, if they charge anything. This gives Palladian | APICS 5 JOb bOaRdS companies a very inexpensive way to advertise locally. The largest “local” site is Craigslist. Craigslist is a classified posting board broken into a series of regional sites. Some companies use Craigslist actively for their job postings, since postings have been free (although recently some fees have been introduced). The downside of a free posting board is the volume of low-quality postings. You will have to sift through a lot of junk to find a posting that will interest you. Although a free local job board can be tedious to follow, it is important to monitor local job postings. No matter how well you know an area, it is likely there are companies you do not know that could be hiring for a position that would be of interest to you. The Strategy Armed with the knowledge of types of sites you should visit, you need to develop a strategy. Picking one job board or even a few at random, will not maximize your chances. You want to make sure you see every advertised job that is of interest to you. The only way to do this is to visit a number of sites. Target Companies: Develop a list of target companies. Visit their jobs page regularly. You want to learn about new postings as quickly as possible. Big Jobs Boards: Visit Monster and CareerBuilder regularly. Assess whether you want to add some of the other large national job boards to your search list. Specialty Sites: Select job boards specializing in your industry. For operations and supply chain roles, you should use the APICS, Institute for Supply Management, Supply Chain Council, and other job boards from industry groups. You should visit these sites and decide which will be the most valuable to you. Local Sites: Identify the major regional sites that cover your area and visit these sites regularly. In total, you should have a list of 10-25 job boards to check. These are likely to include 5-10 companies, 2-5 big job boards, 2-5 specialty sites, and 1-5 local sites. Prioritize these with a schedule. Some you will check daily, others a couple times a week, and the rest weekly or biweekly. With this strategy, you will identify almost all of the opportunities that fit your goals. Unfortunately, checking a handful of sites cannot guarantee you will find everything. There is a chance some jobs will slip through the cracks. To find these, we will use another tool – the Job Aggregators. Palladian | APICS 6 JOb aggREgaTORS Job aggregators are like search engines for jobs. They crawl thousands of job posting sites and republish the jobs they find. This enables a person to conduct a single search, but get exposure to a very large portion of the jobs out there. The two largest job aggregators are Indeed.com and SimplyHired. Both are very good sites. There are a few other aggregators, and we’re likely to see more created in the future. The job aggregators index more jobs than any other site. On a typical day, Monster and CareerBuilder might see 10,000 to 20,000 new postings. Indeed averages well over 100,000 postings per day. The way it does this is by copying the postings from as many other sites as it can. You may be thinking, “If Indeed and SimplyHired index almost every job, why do I need the job boards?” In a perfect world, we would be able to go to a single site for everything. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to the job aggregators. To understand these drawbacks, you need to understand how aggregators work. A job aggregator visits a Web site regularly and copies any new information posted. Each job board, whether a company site, national job board, specialty site, or regional board, has a specific design, and these vary from site to site. Some list salary information, many do not. Some sites classify manufacturing as an industry, others break this down into dozens of specialties. The number of fields and the content of the fields used on each site are far from consistent. This makes it extremely difficult for a job aggregator to consistently repost the information and make it searchable. On a site like CareerBuilder, you can search by industry, job category, job type, salary, company, job title, location, and keywords. On a job aggregator, you need to search with the location and keywords only. There are other search options available, but they are typically not very effective. Anytime you are limited to a keyword search, you will encounter challenges with eliminating the jobs you don’t want from the search without losing the jobs you do want. This can be a problem if you are using a keyword list different from the keywords used by an employer. For example, you may search jobs seeking ERP experience, but the company posting the perfect job for you uses the term MRP in all of its job postings. These are similar enough you probably want to see both, but may not think of every variation of every keyword a company could use. This can cause you to miss jobs on the job aggregator site that would be easier to find on a traditional job board. For this reason, you cannot abandon the job boards. You need to use both job boards and job aggregators in a complementary manner. One final drawback of the job aggregators is the quality of the information. The first problem comes in with the low value jobs. Although the sites try to screen out Palladian | APICS 7 JOb aggREgaTORS postings that are not real jobs (the get rich quick scheme types), it is an automated system and junk does slip through. This can be frustrating, but the sites add enough value to make up for this. Another source of “junk” comes from older postings. Because the job aggregator is reposting information from other sites, you will find situations where an old job is listed as a new job. This occurs when you have multiple sites reposting the same information. For example, Widget Inc. posts a production supervisor job on the first of the month. A job aggregator picks up the posting the next day. A regional job aggregator then picks up the reposting three days later. Another site picks that posting up a few days later… and so one. Now, a month later, the original job aggregator finds the same job newly posted on a site and copies the information to repost it. The result is the job aggregator, a month later, reposts the job as new. The sites work to minimize this, but it does happen – so be careful. alerts One of the greatest benefits of Indeed and SimplyHired are the e-mail alerts. You can create a much targeted search and save it as an alert. Any new postings that match your search will be e-mailed directly to you. This can be extremely powerful. If you create a series of targeted and specific searches, searches that may only yield a few postings a day or less, you will ensure you are notified when your ideal job is advertised. The Strategy There are two primary strategies you can adopt for your search. You can use the job boards as your primary search vehicle and the job aggregators as a backup, or the other way around. If you use the job boards as your primary tool, you will build a search plan similar to the strategy outlined in the Job Boards section. You will then create a series of job alerts on one or more job aggregators (one is probably enough since the bulk of the information on Indeed and SimplyHired is duplicative). Try to create at least five alerts, and possibly a lot more. You want these to be very specific. Each alert might only send you a few jobs a week. The goal is to create a set of alerts to ensure you don’t miss an ideal job. You are going to see the bulk of the positions on the job boards. The alerts are just a safety net catching really important listings that might fall through the cracks. If you use the job aggregators as the primary tool, you will want to still check the job boards regularly. You don’t want to miss a job because your keywords don’t match the keywords of an employer. With this strategy, you will create alerts for your ideal positions. You will check the job aggregator every day for new positions. Finally, you will check each job board in your list every few days or weekly. Palladian | APICS 8 nETWORKing SiTES We’ve all heard the advice. You need to network to maximize your job search chances. Despite this, few people know how to network and most people fail to do much if any networking. Networking is not asking your friends for a job. You need to do a lot more to maximize the value you can get from networking. Fortunately, there are a number of online tools that will make the process easy. The growth of social networking sites has provided a significant opportunity to job seekers. You can maintain relationships, find old coworkers and friends, and build on the relationships you have. This offers an incredible opportunity for job seekers. Unfortunately, many fail to capitalize on these resources. Stigma One of the main reasons people fail to network effectively in a job search is the stigma attached to being unemployed. A lot of people isolate themselves. They interact less with their friends and associates when they are out work, instead of stepping up the level of interaction. There is no magic bullet that will get you over this. You just have to do it. Stay in contact with people you know. Your friends want to help you. It is important to remember that losing a job does not remove everything you have accomplished in your career. Many people tie their identity to their jobs. Without a job, they feel lost and their self confidence drops. Your friends and associates will not reassess your value simply because you aren’t working. Would you end a friendship because your friend lost a job? Of course not. The people you know will want to help you, and they are likely to remember your strengths and accomplishments more than you will. Reach out to them. They will help. What can your network do? Another challenge people face when networking is knowing what to expect. It is very unlikely that you will pick up the phone, call a handful of your friends, and immediately land a job. In a booming economy, this might happen for a few people, but today, you can’t expect it to be that easy. There are three important things your network can do for you. Identify Opportunities: You should let the people in your network know you are looking for a job. They can inform you of opportunities they see, especially with their employer. Knowing when a position opens up can give you the first shot at the job before a lot of other job seekers learn of the position. Palladian | APICS 9