The Supersites are the ones that just about everyone thinks of when you mention Internet job-hunting: Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, America's Job Bank. These sites are hugely popular. In June of 2004 - one month alone - 9.6 million job seekers were online with Monster; CareerBuilder was right behind, with 9.3 million. A recent survey showed that of all people who were job hunting online, 89% registered with Monster. Similar figures exist for the other Supersites.
At their core, like most job sites, the Supersites are matching engines. These are basically search engines that use keywords in your resume as the search term, and try to match these to a database of existing job postings. The Supersites wrap these matching engines in a package with articles and other services related to job hunting.
We know that these sites are popular; but what we don't know is this: of the people who use these sites, how many get jobs? There is no recent, reliable data to tell us how effective the Supersites are. And since they are just matching engines, the real question is: how effective are matching engines, in general, at getting people jobs?
Again, there is no definitive answer. In order for matching engines to work well, they need to have a lot of data to match. Said another way, if you are trying to match your resume to a job posting, your chances of success increase as the number of postings increases. The same goes for employers: they are far more likely to fill a job opening if they have lots of people to choose from.
That said, it makes sense that the more popular a site is, the more likely that both job-hunters and employers will find what they are looking for there. If you think about it, the ideal situation would be if there were only one place, where people went to post resumes and job listings - all job-hunters would be there, at that one place, as would all job openings. If the job you were looking for existed, that is where you would find it. If the right person for an opening was on the planet (and looking for a job), same result.
Well, we're never going to have just one place where we match employers and job-hunters, but the arithmetic says that if you are going to use matching engines, you should go to the most popular matching engines, with the largest databases, and that means the Supersites.
One quick caveat: a number of the Supersites have job postings online that do not actually represent real jobs. Although worded like job listings, they are actually ads, put up by large employers, recruiters, or agencies, to gather in job hunters for one reason or another; not all of the reasons redound to the job-hunter's benefit. Bear it in mind, and as with everything else on the Net, don't be too trusting. At its root, this is all commerce.
Monster
Arguably the best known of all the job-hunting sites on the Internet, Monster has many thousands of job listings, from all over the U.S. Besides searching these listings by keyword, geographic area, and industry, Monster also has a "Job Search Agent", which is a software program that will examine new listings as they are created, and will email you with listings that match your criteria (virtually all of the larger job sites have the same sot of thing, though the name of the service will vary). Most of the job-hunting resources that Monster (and the other Supersites) offer are done better at the Gateway sites; but not everything. Poke around a bit; Monster's basic services are free to the job-hunter, although you must register. It is funded by employers' job listings, and by on-line advertisers (with some pop-up ads). Much of what is good about Monster has to do with its size alone, but it also a well-thought out and designed job site.
Yahoo! HotJobs
(Also try http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/careertools specifically for job-hunting resources.) Not the largest of the Supersites by far, but it offers a better than average selection of articles and links to resources for job-hunters, including salaries, resume writing, interviewing, and relocation. And although there are some for-fee services scattered among the links, for the most part, you will find mostly free stuff here. Various free email newsletters are available, along with other services. You will quickly notice that there is something missing in Hotjobs’ database of job listings: ads. While all of the other Supersites accept “job listings” from agencies and recruiters --- which are often not real jobs at all --- Hotjobs only accepts listings from principals. As with the other Supersites, employers are charged to list their job openings or search resumes, while services are free to the job-hunter once you register HotJobs brings Yahoo!’s resources and experience to the table in the community and networking arena. For example, if you click on the “Communities” link, you will see a list of about 35 professions where you can join in discussions with people seeking work in those fields. As with all such chat facilities, you do need to choose what you read carefully; there is a lot of complaining here… but regardless, there is still information to be had and contacts to be made.
America's Job Bank
If you want proof that the government occasionally does something right, you might start here. America's Job Bank is one of four interlinked sites sponsored by the Department of Labor, and the employment development departments of the 50 states. It is free to both employers and job-hunters. Since a large part of the job listings comes from state EDDs, this is not a bad place to go if you are looking for jobs in state and local governments, school districts, state-run secondary education, public utilities, and so forth. Not all of the jobs listed here are gems; but there are a lot of them. You are allowed to sort the job listings by relevance to your search keywords, but there is still a lot of chaff to be culled. Possibly more than with the other job boards, you should be careful about the currency of job listings on America's Job Bank. Not all employers pull their listings once they are filled. Before applying for a position that is some weeks old, you might confirm that it is still a viable opening.
CareerBuilder
Careerbuilder is jointly owned by the Tribune Company, Gannett, and Knight-Ridder — newspaper companies all. This means that they not only accept paid postings from employers, but their database also has the want-ads from around 200 newspapers across the country. As a result, their database is huge, and because of this newspaper origin of many of the postings, you will find more lower-tech and traditionally blue collar jobs listed here. Registering with the site allows you to search their database by keyword, field, and location; they offer newsletters and other services. Because of their newspaper background, they also partner with websites that offer apartment rentals, autos for sale, and networking across the country. This site is more commercially oriented than the other Supersites, and there are certainly more pop-up ads. I was struck by their Resources page; the vast majority of links on the page lead to a fee-based offer, rather than the more typical free Internet resource.
