The Internet: The 10% Solution
A RECENT (3/27/09) NIELSEN Company study found that in the U.S. the average adult is spending eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen—be it a computer screen, cell phone screen, TV screen, DVDs, sports channels, video games, or whatever.
So naturally, when we are out of work, our instinct is to move to a screen for help: in this case, our computer screen and the Internet. In the U.S., at least three out of every four adults have access to the Internet.
How much does this help us find work? Statistics change over time, but past studies have shown that this results in a job for 10 out of every 100 job-hunters who try it. The other 90 have to turn elsewhere to locate those vacancies that do exist.
Still, if it works for you, you will thank your lucky stars for the Internet. So, I call this “the 10% Solution.” It solves job-hunters’ problems in 10% of cases; therefore it deserves 10% of every job-hunter’s time, just in case. But not more than that. Unless you like beating your head against a brick wall.
Let’s rehearse what we as job-hunters can find on the Internet:
The Internet is a place where employers go, to list some of their vacancies, but by no means all.
The Internet is a place where job-hunters go, to find those vacancies, or to hunt for employers regardless of known vacancies. It is also the place where job-hunters list their own availability, in case some bright-eyed employer is prowling the Internet—and notices.
And for completeness let us add: the Internet is also a place for advice, career counseling, testing, researching careers, industries, salaries, companies, or individuals who have the power to hire you, and actually making contact with people who may be able to do you some good (networking).
In this connection, I should mention that on the Internet there are free guides to the entire job-hunt process. In addition to my own website, jobhuntersbible.com, there are six sites I recommend as most comprehensive and helpful:
www.job-hunt.org run by Susan Joyce.
www.jobstar.org run by Mary Ellen Mort.
www.rileyguide.com run by Margaret F. Dikel.
www.quintcareers.com run by Dr. Randall Hansen.
www.cacareerzone.org run by the California Career Resource Network. Once you are on the home page, it gives you a choice between running the site under Text, Graphic, or Flash. Choose Graphic; I ran Flash, but it had serious hiccups at the time I tried it. Still, this site has nice self-tests, and much else. So, run it under Graphic, if Flash fails.
What should I know before I start my job-search on the Internet?
In a word, your target. Many job-hunters “network” without any thought to what they’re networking for. And when nothing works out, month after month, they express bewilderment.
“But I’ve been networking, just like everyone says I should!” they cry. I look at them, incredulous. “To what end?” I reply.
They wander like rudderless ships, drifting down the coast, carried briefly into any harbor they encounter, before being carried again out to sea. They have no destination; there is no city they are trying to reach. They’re relying on plain blind Luck. “Maybe I’ll stumble across something that sounds interesting.” Yes, maybe you will. But most likely, you won’t.
Having no clear target is the reason so many people are out of work during this brutal economic time.
So, before you go on the Internet define a target, a destination you are trying to reach. Write it down, and keep it at your elbow:
1. What kind of work are you looking for? What job-title specifically? on or off the Internet.
2. What industry or field are you looking for? on or off the Internet.
3. What section of the country are you looking for? on or off the Internet.
4. What kind of salary are you looking for? on or off the Internet.
If you can’t answer these questions with words, close your eyes and try to visualize what kind of work would give you the greatest delight to do. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. As they say.
Okay, then what sites should I go to, to hunt for whatever vacancies employers have decided to post on the Internet?
1. Omnibus Search Engines. These are sites which search for all the job listings on the Internet, thus saving you from having to go and visit each job-board, one by one.
Examples: Simplyhired.com. This site claims to have over 5 million job listings, worldwide, as of 3/31/09.
Indeed.com. This site claims to discover and index over 50 million jobs per year.
2. The Famous Job Boards.
Examples: careerbuilder.com
3. Community Bulletin Boards.
Example: craigslist.org
4. Niche Sites for Jobs in Specific Fields or Industries. To turn these up, for the industry that interests you, put the name of the industry and the word “jobs” into Google’s search engine.
If you have no idea what industry you are hunting for, but you do know the basic building blocks of the job you are seeking, then put into your favorite search engine, such as Google, your skills, and field of interest (in one or three words) and see what industries these point to. Be specific. Not just your favorite skills—“writing researching speaking”—but skills and fields (for example) “writing renewable energy researching.” That sort of narrowing down.
Example of a niche site: dice.com. This is for tech or IT jobs.
5. Social Networking Sites. Job-hunters are paying a lot of attention to these particular sites these days, inasmuch as over five million unemployed people are now ‘networking’: trying to meet as many people as they possibly can, because—well, that’s what they’ve been told to do. Networking is ‘hot.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean it will lead to a job.
These sites, like all the previous ones, may turn up jobs; but they particularly excel at turning up names of people. These sites help you look for people in your favorite industry; they may know of vacancies not being advertised as yet (thus comprising the so-called “hidden job market”).
Anyway, if these sites have jobs, here is where they can be found:
LinkedIn.com/jobs. LinkedIn claims to be “the” professional network on the Web; certainly it is the most talked about. It has over 35 million members, in 170 industries, at this writing. ‘Professional’ doesn’t mean white collar necessarily. Construction workers, for example, list themselves on this site; construction companies know that, and come here searching for them—when there’s work to be had. There are similar sites to LinkedIn, notably plaxo.com. A complete list can be found at http://bit.ly/SC4l in Wikipedia.
Twitterjobsearch.com. Twitter has at least 6 million “users” who send “tweets.” (Only 140 characters or spaces at a time, as you probably know.) Twistoridesktop.com allows you to search Twitter with keywords—or clusters of them—of your own choosing. Exectweets.com follows top business leaders; you can search by field or industry. WeFollow.com drills down into Twitter, and lets you search categories to see who’s “twittering” from that category or industry. And there is also Twitdir.com; dir is short for “directory.” Incidentally, TweetDeck.com is a wonderful way to organize your social contacts on the Internet.
Jobs.MySpace.com. MySpace has over 106 million members worldwide. It currently has the largest U.S. base among all the social networking sites, but that’s predicted to change by January 2010, when Facebook will likely surpass it.
Facebook.com. There are over 20 applications you can use within Facebook to find a job; a nice list of them is to be found at http://blog.bincsearch.com/?p=1108; Facebook currently has over 42 million U.S. members, over 175 million worldwide.
There! There are the five kinds of sites that you should explore, if you’re looking for vacancies advertised on the Internet by employers.
Why doesn’t the Internet work better at finding jobs?
It mostly has to do with the fact that job-hunters and employers like to look for each other, in almost exactly opposite ways. Resumes and the Internet are high on a job-hunter’s preferred list; not necessarily on an employer’s. You can see this from the following diagram:
Many If Not Most Employers Hunt for Job-Hunters in the Exact Opposite Way from How Most Job-Hunters Hunt for Them
Besides this ironic fact illustrated by the above diagram, there is another.
When an employer comes on the Internet looking for someone to hire, they are essentially engaging in an activity called ‘job-matching.’
Now, job-matching works by using job-titles.
And job-titles are, generally speaking, a big problem for the Internet. Not a big problem when you’re looking for a job that has a simple title, such as “secretary,” or “gardener,” or “nurse,” or “driver,” or “waitress,” or “mechanic,” or “salesperson.” Any of these should turn up a lot of matches.
But, you may be looking for a job that various employers call by differing titles, and that’s an entirely different ballgame. If you guess wrongly about what they call the job you’re looking for, then you and those employers will be like two ships passing in the night, on the Internet high seas. Your faithful, hardworking computer will report back to you in the morning: “No matches,” when in fact there actually are. You just didn’t guess correctly what title those employers are using. Oops!
Finally, job-titles are a problem for Internet searches because a typical job-board on the Internet may limit you to a prepared list of only two dozen job-titles, from which you must choose. This leaves out the other 20,000 job-titles that are out there in the work world—including, of course, the one that you are searching for, in particular.
So sure, Internet job-matching works. Sometimes. Beautifully. But know ahead of time that you can’t count on it necessarily working for You. In the end, it’s a big fat gamble that works about 10% of the time. It’s a 10% solution to your problem.