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Career

September 14, 1998


Job-Hunting Help Online

The Web offers plenty of resources for finding the right job at the right salary

By Norbert Turek

I nformation technology jobs are so plentiful these days that virtually any technical person who posts a resumé on a major Internet job site will get a flood of calls from recruiters. But you can increase your chances of finding the right job-one in which you'll be doing the work you enjoy for a solid company that pays well-by developing a strategy for using the Web's resources.

One of the first things to do when looking for a job is get an idea of what salary your skills and experience can command. JobSmart provides links to salary surveys for many professions, including IT. InformationWeek Online's Career area lets you enter your job title and compare your salary with others in the same region of the country, the same industry, or with the same level of experience. You can also find out which regions and which industries have the highest salary levels. Janet Ruhl's Computer Consultant's Resource Page lets you compare your salary with those of others who know the same programming languages.

Once you've got a target salary in mind, JobSmart provides a lot of good general information for job hunters, including articles on how to structure your resumé, how and where to post it, tips for finding jobs that are never advertised, and background on high-tech job sites.

What Color Is Your Parachute: The Net Guide, by Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the What Color is Your Parachute? book series (Ten Speed Press), also has advice on writing a resumé, developing contacts, and other topics, as well as descriptions of and links to a wide variety of job sites and resources on the Net-including IT job sites.

After you've prepared your resumé, it's time to target specific companies to send it to. JobSmart has links to articles on the top companies to work for, published by Fortune, Forbes, Working Woman, and other publications.

JobSmart's Webmaster, Mary-Ellen Mort, also suggests visiting your local library to talk to a reference librarian who can direct you to a company index, such as The Directory of Corporate Technology. "Pull together a prospect list of employers and visit their Web sites," she says. "There are 17 million businesses in the U.S., most of whom don't have it together to put listings on a lot of job sites."

You can also find information on companies on the Web. Yahoo's Business and Economy: Companies lets you search by industry and sectors. Microsoft's library provides links to thousands of corporate Web sites, and Hoover's Online offers brief company profiles for free and more in-depth information for an annual fee starting around $110.

JobSmart has articles on how to develop contacts that might alert you to job openings at the companies you're targeting. Donald Asher, author of several books on job hunting, provides excellent tips on how to approach companies you want to work for and what to say.

Searching The Job Sites
You can also search the job sites for vacancies-but there are many, so be selective. Weddle's Web Guide at National Business Employment Weekly provides information on the 50 largest career sites, including the number of jobs and resumés posted, salary ranges for jobs, cost to subscribers, and other details.

Margaret Dikel, who manages another good job information site, The Riley Guide, says it's a mistake to use only the largest sites. "It's fine to focus on one or two of the big sites," she says, "but then move on and focus on IT-specific sites, like trade organizations or magazines that list their classifieds." (For a look at some of the best IT job sites, see story here.)

Site Seekers
If you want to be sure you don't miss any openings, there are some programs that search multiple sites for jobs that meet your criteria and return the results to your computer. Wanted Jobs 98 is a new Windows 95 freeware product from Wanted Technologies Corp. that searches 22 of the biggest sites and pulls down information you can view online or offline.

Subsequent searches using the same criteria will again bring all hits from the supported sites, but jobs that have been posted since the last search will be marked with a "new" icon. Wanted Technologies president David Tanguey says Wanted Jobs 98 goes to the home Web site before each search and looks for updates and patches, so you always have the latest version of the agent. Tanguey says that with more bandwidth, the application could ultimately reach many more sites.

Another option is to post your resumé on your own home page and wait for recruiters to find you. John Sumser, CEO of the Internet Business Network, an online journal about electronic recruiting, suggests that you simply post your resumé on the home page of your Internet service provider. "There are 30 active spiders searching the Web at this minute-they'll find you," he says. "Just sit back and watch what happens."

Discretion In Job Hunting
Of course, there's always the chance that your own company is trawling the Web for potential job candidates and may find your resumé. There's also the issue of privacy. One IT worker who asked not to be named said she wouldn't list her personal information because "you just don't know who's going to see that information."

Job sites have developed ways to preserve your privacy. A growing number of them will let you post your resumé anonymously. Others let you enter information about your skills and will notify you when a job you might qualify for has been posted; you decide whether or not to let that company see your resumé. Still others let you name specific companies that you don't want to see your resumé.

But be aware that headhunters can download your resumé from a secure site and will likely keep calling you long after you've found your next job.

"We get lots of messages from people asking how to stop the calls," says Craig Besant, VP of marketing at Online Career Center, one of the top seven career sites. "But we don't control what happens once the resumé gets out of our secure site."


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