The Best Way To Find (And Fill) A Job Online

From Alibaba.com  Published: 27 May 2009 00:27:05 PST

Author: Miriam Marcus

For nearly 9% of the working U.S. population, finding a job has become a full-time job--and the search is only going to get tougher.

The Web has come a long way in leveling the playing field for job
seekers and employers alike. As the unemployed ranks continue to swell,
throngs of displaced workers are looking to job-placement sites for
salvation. In April, such sites attracted 57.2 million "unique
visitors," up nearly 50% from the same period last year, according to
Nielsen, an audience-tracking firm. (The number of unique visitors, a
common Web-traffic metric, is the total number of people
who visited a site during a particular reporting period; anyone who
visited the same Web site more than once during the period is not
counted again.)

The three most popular sites--CareerBuilder.com, Yahoo!
HotJobs and Monster.com--have been at this game for a decade. But in
recent years a slew of new sites have sprung up and are stealing market share from the big three.

Among them are aggregator sites, such as Simply Hired, Indeed,
Snagajob.com and Beyond.com, which pull and reorganize postings from
other job sites to make them easy to surf. "Many corporate companies post job openings on their own corporate
Web sites, so aggregators knock out the necessity to go around from
site to site targeting specific companies," says Chuck Schilling,
research director at Nielsen.

Certainly the rotten economy is driving demand
for more job sites. But there's a heavy psychological component at work
here, too. Newer sites carry "the shiny-and-new syndrome," says Lorne
Epstein, recruiting expert and author of You're Hired! Interview Skills
to Get the Job, so even if another site does the same thing, there is a
hope that a newer site will do it better.

With Nielsen's help, we ranked the most trafficked job-placement
sites using unique-visitor data from the month of April. In the top
spot, Careerbuilder.com clocked in at 18 million unique visitors, up 4%
from the same period a year earlier, thanks in part to an aggressive
advertising campaign in sync with the failing economy. Yahoo! HotJobs came in at No. 2, with 9 million, down nearly 12%, followed by Monster with 8 million, off almost 5%.

Simply Hired "came out of nowhere" at No. 4, says Schilling, more
than doubling its traffic year-over-year to 5.4 million visitors. In
addition to compiling postings listed on specific company Web sites, Simply Hired offers automatic news feeds, social networking tools and salary information.

Two government-job
sites, USAJOBS.gov and GovernmentJobs.com, came in at No. 6 and No. 14,
with 2.8 million and 1 million visitors, respectively. Relative
newcomer SnagAJob.com, aimed specifically at the hourly job market,
clocked in at No. 9 with 1.8 million visitors. At the higher end of the
spectrum, the subscription-driven TheLadders.com, which focuses on jobs
paying north of $100,000 a year, ranked 12th with 1.3 million visitors.

Epstein, a job coach for 16 years, is quick to point out that
searching and posting résumés to job sites is only a small piece of the
job-search puzzle. Additional follow-up and relentless networking are
also critical to success.
Schilling agrees: "Sending out blind résumés gives a false sense of
working and moving forward in the process of finding a job," he adds.