• Working with Recruiters


• Job Search Better and Smarter Than Your Competition


• Harnessing the Power of the Internet in Your Job Search


• Background Checks on Job Applicants


• Disclosing Salary Information to Potential Employers


• When a Job Search Takes Too Long

Harnessing the Power of the Internet in Your Job Search

Essentially, there are three ways to use the Internet in your job search:
1. To research information about companies and organizations
2. To locate actual job listings
3. To apply for positions by posting your resume on a job board

1. Research

Use the Internet to find specific information about companies and organizations of interest. This will help you write focused cover letters as well as prepare for interviews. In addition, the not-for-profit website www.dmoz.org/business/ will allow you to search companies by industry type, a great tool if you are targeting a specific kind of industry.

2. Locate Job Listings

Job listings on the Internet are extensive. Many can be found on the individual websites of companies and organizations. Therefore, on a regular basis, search the corporate sites of organizations that interest you.
There are also job listings on the websites of professional and trade organizations. So, if you are interested in a job in the insurance industry, for example, look at the website of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (naifa.org) <LIVE LINK> The third and largest category of Internet job listings belongs to the commercial sites. You can use these sites like an electronic version of the newspaper classifieds, perusing the job ads by category. Though you won't have to pay to look at the listings, employers pay to post and that's why these sites, called job boards, are commercial.

Some of the most well-known and largest are monster.com, hotjobs.com, and careerbuilder.com, which attempt to cover a wide array of occupations. In addition to those, there are hundreds of others, some of which are entirely devoted to a specific occupation or career field. You can find these occupation-specific sites by selecting a search engine such as msn.com, yahoo.com, or google.com, and typing in a phrase like "jobs in finance" This will yield links to many job boards that specialize in your particular functional area or field.

3. Apply for Positions

In addition to looking at the job ads on the commercial sites, these sites also function as a giant searchable bulletin board where you can post your resume (and cover letter) for employers who are searching for talent. Each of these job boards will have directions on how to do this. Be aware that these boards use plain text for document storage and transmission. This means that all formatting enhancements that dress up your resume and make it look attractive on the page (lines, bullets, indented text) will be lost and some may actually become distorted in the process. Therefore, you will need to "clean up" your posted resume to a certain extent.

For a list of websites you can use in your job search, visit my employment links section and you will find links to many of the major job boards currently in vogue.

Note to editors and publishers: M J Feld, President of Careers by Choice, Inc. hereby authorizes the reprinting of the content from Career Central. If you wish to do so, please provide the proper citation as follows: This content was provided by M J Feld, a master's level career counselor and certified professional resume writer. Additional career advice can be found on her website, www.careersbychoice.com.