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Internet Life professional

Employment Resources

  BY ALAN S. KAY   

Any employment expert will tell you that networking is essential. As hard as you work to identify job possibilities, you'll do better if you have friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in your corner passing along news of openings, recommending you, and passing your resume around. The Web, and more broadly the Internet, is the world's best support network for the job seeker: You can find out about jobs virtually as soon as they become available through a huge number of sites and scan them quickly using agents and search criteria. And it's certainly not irrelevant that job-seeking through the Web is largely free:You can tap into databases that only a few years ago would have cost you hundreds of dollars in fees to have someone access for you.



The Riley Guide, subtitled "Employment Opportunities and Job Resources on the Internet," is dedicated to Margaret F. Riley of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has put together and maintains this impressive compilation of free Internet employment resources. Many of the other employment-related sites lack personality, but Riley and her ethics are clearly in charge here. She demands, for example, "All services and resources included in this guide must provide free and open access to the job listings they host or to significant other information, services, and/or resources of benefit to the job seeker. Sites which are merely selling products or advertising their services will not be included. All sites and resources are evaluated by a select team of career and information service professionals. . . .However, the final decision for inclusion or rejection is mine." Here you'll find hand-holding instructions on how to use the Internet, both in general and as a job search tool, and lots and lots of employment resources, all annotated and linked. Thanks, Margaret!

Job Search and Employment Opportunities is an opinionated subject index to job and career development information and resources. Although the site is visually not very interesting, it offers valuable hand-holding for job seekers. It is strongest at cutting through the thicket of available resources to point you to the most useful ones, particularly for job searches in specific career categories such as science, technology, business, and government. For government jobs, for example, it describes and links to FedWorld's telnet site; the FedWorld Jobs, Labor, and Management Web Page; MedSearch America; and Yahoo's Employment page. Under the humanities and social sciences listings, we saw summaries of and links to job openings for economists supplied by the American Economics Association, the Library and Information Science Placement Service, and the University of Waterloo's Scholarly Societies Project (a gateway to more than 500 scholarly societies worldwide). "Our intent," say the authors, "is to save you the trouble and frustration of following up on leads that are narrowly focused, are not updated regularly, or are not organized in a way that allows one to use the material easily."

CareerMosaic stands out among the many bland institutional sites in being well designed and colorful. Because of the complexity of the graphics, though, a high-speed Internet connection helps. Run by Bernard Hodes Advertising, one of the largest recruitment advertising and human resources communications agencies in the world, CareerMosaic allows you to search the J.O.B.S. (Jobs Offered By Search) database by description, title, company, and location. You can also search Usenet newsgroups, look for jobs overseas in the International Herald Tribune job listings, and access employer descriptions, lots of links to opportunities for students, and on-line job fairs, as well as resume and cover letter tips and advice on nailing that job.

Every day, Career Magazine, a publication of National Career Search, a staffing agency, downloads and indexes all of the job postings from the major Internet jobs newsgroups. These postings are searchable by location, job title, and/or required skills and can be sorted by relevance or date of posting. You'll also find articles that cover key job search issues (an interview primer, how to make your resume irresistible, the secret to finding a good headhunter, and the like) and some three dozen employer profiles, each linked to the company's home page. You can post your resume here for $17.50, but one of the most valuable offerings at this site is an area for discussion of job search and workplace issues, which can be a great help in getting your questions answered and helping you understand you're not alone.


The day may come when you can count on finding all employment ads on-line. For the moment, though, major metropolitan daily newspapers remain a must-check resource. Happily, a handful of them now supply their employment classifieds fresh every day through CareerPath.com, which allows a simultaneous search of listings from The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News, and The Washington Post. At a recent visit, we found some 37,000 ads available.



The Monster Board, run by Adion Information Services, a New England agency, features job listings, resumes, and employer information. The search engine here can be very thorough, but also somewhat more difficult to use than at some other pages. An extensive form allows you to post a resume (and block your current employer from seeing it!) that will be available on-line for a year and which you can update as needed. The profiles of employer companies are quite extensive. The Monster Board also offers a section called ROAR that is designed for young job seekers.



The Career Resource Center's CareerNET is a very comprehensive site, with links to thousands of job listings and hundreds of job and career-related resources. As the banner declares, "If it's about your career, it's here!!!" Links are keyed from the home page by the 100 best job Internet sites, sites with information about specific jobs, employer pages, and reference information. We saw lists of business and professional associations, franchising companies, and lots of other resources. You can also look at jobs and employment resources by state.

The Online Career Center is an outgrowth of the Career Center, a service James Gonyea first began on America Online that gave birth to Help Wanted-USA, a large on-line database, heavy in high-tech positions, that's updated weekly. At this very busy site, job seekers can search a list of job openings by title, keyword, company, or region, and get back a list sorted by posting date.You also can post a plain text version of your resume for free that'll be available to employers for 90 days.

E-Span is an attractive, well designed Web site that houses a database of more than 6,000 job ads, at last count. To use the system, you must register, which means providing personal and job interest data. To respond to an ad, you also need to file an on-line resume.

The Catapult was originally based at the Office of Career Services of the College of William and Mary, but now has moved to JobWeb, sponsored by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Listed here are an array of helpful resources that include links to job listings by region and by field, as well as internships, headhunters and search firms, temp agencies, help guides, and pointers to employer and career information. The Catapult also offers useful links to relocation information and information for persons with disabilities.

JobHunt can boast of a compelling presentation, but the value here is the extensive listing of useful Internet-accessible job-search resources and services. This is another good place to start your search.

Academe This Week is the on-line version of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It averages about 1,000 listings a week of currently open positions in higher education and related fields, searchable by key word or geographically.

The College Grad Job Hunter is drawn from the book of the same name by Brian D. Krueger. You'll find lots of good, in-depth guidance here on resumes, cover letters, references, networking, interviewing, and negotiating. The site also offers information on preparing your resume and where to post it, and provides links to a strategic selection of job listings sites.

The Entry Level Job Seeker Assistant is a page dedicated to helping people who have never held a full-time permanent job in their field or have less than a year of experience. It's not visually very interesting, but employment is one area where the graphics doesn't count for much compared to the contents. The links are to the job pages of largely technology-related companies (such as Bellcore, IBM, and Symantec), newsgroups, and other job sites. If you have a resume elsewhere on the Web, you can e-mail the administrator here to get it linked from this site. 3.0

CareerSite, run by Ann Arbor-based Virtual Resources Corp., offers the job seeker a virtual agent to identify job possibilities. Registration provides the agent with the information it needs to search for job possibilities and e-mail you; your resume is also available to employers. This site is nicely put together. Structuring a query can be challenging, though.

For those who need some help writing cover letters, the Rensselaer Writing Center offers some guidance and two sample letters. You'll also find links to other writing resources.

The Business Job Finder at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business lets you explore careers in finance, accounting, and management. You'll find extensive and interesting information on jobs in these areas including qualifications, expectations, skill levels, and links to potential employers, plus some job listings and links to other collections of listings.

The Women's Center for Employment is a brand new site sponsored by OnLine Solutions intended to pull together resources of use to women seeking jobs and careers. Here you'll find interesting reviews of books and articles focusing on employment issues for women. Another section offers some analysis of industry trends (unfortunately, relying on statistics that aren't sourced) and a listing labeled the 100 Best Companies for Working Women.

SenseMedia's GetAJob offers a good collection of links to job information sites ranging from the American Astronomical Society to Water Resources and Wisconsin State Agencies.

Also in the area of support for women seeking jobs, Career Development Activities for Young Women, run by the Kansas State University College of Education, offers an interesting assessment of how personal interest may translate into a non-traditional occupation. You'll also find information here on mentoring programs.

MedSearch America lists health care positions at a site run by a Redmond, Washington, medical employment firm.

America's Job Bank, formerly the Interstate Job Bank, links the 1,800 state Employment Service offices in the U.S.

A Web-wide listing of resume databases, when we looked, linked to 66 databases of use to job seekers.

Saludos Web has dozens of job listings for Hispanics.

The Business & Employment section of the Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides, a service of Argus Associates and the University of Michigan, provides some 38 links to useful sites, many of them about employment. Unfortunately, they aren't annotated, so you need to work through them one by one.

The Directory of Executive Recruiters lists recruiters by field. Unfortunately, the links are only to capsule summaries with phone numbers; e-mail addresses are provided in some cases.

You'll find a long but unannotated listing of all sorts of employment links at the American Society of Agricultural Engineers' Employment List. We found 138 links here to academic institutions, companies, associations, and Web sites, many of them not widely available on other pages.

Salary information can be hard to come by. At Salary Guides you'll find data for computer, engineering, and finance jobs supplied by Source Edp.

Atlanta's ComputerJobs Store offers help and information on careers in one of the newly hot high-tech markets.

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QUICK CLICK!
The Riley Guide

Job Search and Employment Opportunities

CareerMosaic

Career Magazine

CareerPath.com

The Monster Board

CareerNET

Online Career Center

E-Span

The Catapult

JobHunt

Academe This Week

College Grad Job Hunter

Entry Level Job Seeker Assistant

CareerSite

help writing cover letters

The Business Job Finder

The Women's Center for Employment

GetAJob

Career Development Activities for Young Women

MedSearch America

America's Job Bank

resume databases

Saludos Web

Business & Employment

Directory of Executive Recruiters

American Society of Agricultural Engineers' Employment List

Salary Guides

Atlanta's ComputerJobs Store