Hire Ground

Job boards have become huge businesses the past 10 years. They allow both companies to advertise job openings as well as allow recruiters to search for people who have posted their interest in finding a new job.

Monster advertises heavily on television. Craiglist and KitList spread by word of mouth. Jobster culls listings from other sites as well as their own listings.

There are job boards that masquerade as social or networking sites such as Linkedin.

Some job boards specialize in career field or salary ranges or job levels (executive vs. employee). TheLadders is an example of one that is both executive and jobs with salaries above $100k. So it’s a good source to find opportunities if you are making more than $100k. It is a national site.

There are national sites as well as regional sites.

For state by state jobs sites run (contracted) by the individual states go to you state.gov site and click on work or jobs, etc. Several states appear to have contracted with an outfit called CareerOneStop. You can use this link to go to the location you are interested in.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using job boards.

The quality of the search engines (the software that will pull jobs up for you varies, sometimes a lot. What you are able to put up on the board so recruiters can find you in a search varies even more.

Be creative in your search on any board.

Keywords are critical. If you chose poor keywords, you may be inundated with a ton of jobs. This can backfire for you since you’ll likely stopped searching the entire list.

It’s a double edge sword. If you’re too restrictive, you’re becoming dependent on the company’s job description matching your search criteria. I searched several boards for hardware management openings before I learned that the majority of engineering management openings don’t state hardware or software in the description.

A search for Design Engineer will return both HW and SW, but a search for Hardware Engineer will return almost nothing. Most job descriptions for Hardware Design jobs don’t seem to include the word Hardware. Almost all Software jobs seem to include that in the description. Mechanical jobs as well.

Hmmm, there is that software thing again. You think they have to have it spelled out for them? Nah.......... Couldn’t be.

A major disadvantage of job boards is that most jobs aren’t landed by going through a board or even a company web site.

Networking is the name of the game.

A major advantage of job boards is that they do have a lot of openings listed.

The best way to use a job board is by finding the job that you are interested in and then find someone you now either directly or through a friend and have your resume submitted through the network.

A disadvantage to this approach is if the job is listed through a recruiter. But read the description carefully. If you’re familiar with the industry and the area, you may be able to guess which company has the opening and confirm it on their web site. even if there are 3-4 suspects, searching their sites is quick work.

Next we’ll tackle networking.