I’m suddenly back in the job-hunting market after 20 years and am having trouble figuring out how to go about it. My experience/education is in a very technical field. I have heard a lot of anecdotal negative reports about huge resume-collection places like monster.com, concerning spam and being contacted about totally inappropriate positions.
Is monster.com legit/worthwhile? What are the risks, if any, of giving them my personal info? Has anyone here actually found a job through them or a similar online firm?
Looking from the other side, I’ve used Monster - once - when trying to fill a technical post (this was in the UK) . Never again! I got hundreds of applications but the vast majority of them were useless - from people without a hope of getting the job. It just wasn’t worth my time wading through the rubbish to find the one or two good people.
Now I advertise on specialist sites, normally the job site of the trade/professional magazine linked to the speciality, in the local papers (lot easier if the successful applicant does not have to move into an expensive part of England), and through technical agencies.
When I was applying for jobs last no employer got in touch with me, but a recruiter did, who got me several job offers. Setting up a monster account is one of the steps you should take, but don’t rely on it.
Honestly, job hutning is the most exhausting and time-consuming work you can find. And it pays crap, too. Good luck.
I had a similar experience to Diomedes. I have highly specialized skills. I posted a brief resume on Monster.com and then pretty much forgot about it. No employers contacted me, but I did get a few e-mails from recruiters for wildly inappropriate jobs, which I simply ignored. Then a few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a recruiter for a position exactly matching my skill set. He put me in touch with the company, who considered me a godsend, and now the employment contract’s in the mail. YMMV.
I got my current (dream) job via Monster – my resume was up, they contacted me, bing bang boom. IOW, not everyone with a job posts the job – you can also pay $X to read resumes – so it might well be worth it to have your resume there.
Spam – some, but the filter on the email account I was using in conjunction with the search is pretty good – and being contacted for inappropriate jobs – well, hell, how many seconds does it take to roll your eyes and hit “delete”?
I never had luck with it. I found that temp-to-perm was best suited to my needs. With a highly technical job, they may use you folks as contractors. My advice is to use a specialized agency. They’ll know where the jobs in your field are.
I’ve had enormous luck posting “job wanted” ads with Craig’s List (I never post my resume- I post a creative and eye catching ad tell them I’ll a resume if they are interested…they always just ask you in for the interview). It might be more useful in some fields and some locales than others, but it’s worked very well for me.
I have found one job via monster. Most of my jobs have come from personal networking. But I have had some interesting leads off of Monster. It doesn’t cost anything to put your resume up and I have had no down side.
I got more spam from careerbuilder.com than I did monster, and both sent me notices that weren’t conducive to my field of expertise. But it was better than nothing.
I applied for plenty of jobs through those two sites, but never got any callbacks. However, I did get contacted by several staffing agencies, and got my current job through one of them.
The problems I had later on were through the staffing agency, not through monster or careerbuilder. Their background checkers confused my name with somebody else’s and they asked me about a felony that I didn’t commit. So, if you have a common name, you might want to go ahead and get a printout of your public record from your county courthouse and bring that along to your interview if a staffing agency contacts you. I otherwise have had no problems with monster or careerbuilder abusing my personal info. All they really know about you is what’s on your resume.
Brown Eyed Guy is using monster.com in his current job search. Nothing as of yet, other than contact from a specialized placement service. It seems they are the ones that are mining the data on sites like that, not the actual employers. Everyone needs a cut, ya know.
I never posted my resume, but I did use the search function to scan for jobs. I got in contact with an agency that way, and while the job I applied through the agency for wasn’t to my liking, another job was, and I got it. So to that extent I found it useful.
FWIW, I got my current job through monster - not by replying to an ad, but by having my resume out there. My previous position was through dice.com - which is a little more targeted, of course. Both were/are great jobs with Fortune 500 companies.
The usual caveats apply: Your inbox will suffer from a very poor signal/noise ratio, as tons of work-from-home and “pay-us-to-get-your-resume-in-the-right-hands” scam artists will try their luck.
Related question - how valid are the job ads on sites like monster? The job ‘posted date’ does not seem to be true, because I have seen the same job appearing day after day for over a month with the current day as the posted date.
Also, on many occasions I have found that the job posted on monster does not appear in the ‘careers’ or ‘jobs’ tabs on the website of the original company or the recruiter. This seems to imply that the jobs on monster keep appearing although the vacancy has been filled up or the job does not exist any longer with the hiring company.
To the op I would add that dice.com seemed to have worked for me.
Speaking as someone who has been trying to find a stable job for the last two years - the big job hunting sites SUCK, and aren’t worth your time. You’re honestly better off going with craigslist, since companies who post on there are more desperate to fill right away, and I have managed to find a couple of short term positions through there.
However, responding to job listings at all has about a 3% return rate. You have a much much higher success rate through social networking. Ever hear that expression “it’s all about who you know?” … well, almost every GOOD job I’ve ever gotten has been by putting myself directly in contact with someone who either does the hiring by a friend or acquaintance, or can give me a personal referral to someone who does. Recruiting agencies are also great for finding work, but again, it helps if you KNOW somebody who can get you started at one…I’ve found that going in as a total stranger has yielded little success in being the one they choose to call about jobs, if I get an interview at all.
I got a job with the Department of Homeland Security through Monster.com. I worked for T.S.A. as a security screener. So yeah, there are decent jobs on that site. There are a lot of crap jobs too. Just don’t fall for jobs that say “MAKE $100,000 A YEAR WITH INCENTIVES !!”, those are bullshit.
I’m not sure if I trust Craigs List, but I would certainly submit resumes on Monster, HotJobs (or Yahoo! Jobs if that’s what it is now), CareerBuilder and any other specialty site. That way recruiters and companies can find you.
You should already be using LinkedIn and/or Plaxo to keep track of your professional contacts.
If you went to college, sign up for your career center’s alumni database. Same if you were in a fraternity or worked for a company that keeps an alumni database (many consulting firms do).
You should already be going to as many school and industry networking functions as you can.
Also, it is about who you know. So don’t hang out with a bunch of losers and douchebags.
Ask the Headhunter has some good tips on job finding. Nick is a head hunter, and he hates the big sites. He’s posted some numbers on the percentage of hires that come from them - it is very low. We’ve never hired someone from there, but we do specialized tech hiring.
If you want to apply to a big company, go to their website, look for openings, and send in your resume targeted to a specific job. Even if that one is gone, if the manager is still looking and likes what he or she sees you’ve got a better chance. Nick also advises calling people - people you know, but also people in your field who are visible and work for companies you want to join. I’m pretty visible in my field, and no one calls (except students) so don’t worry about these folks being swamped by calls.
You never know. Someone I worked with on an external committee sent his resume, which was on my screen when a manager came in looking for help in defining a job request. What he wanted and the resume were a perfect match, and the guy got hired very quickly.
Short answer - if you use the big sites, don’t hold your breath waiting for a response.
Your results with variuous types of sites will vary depending on the type of job you are trying to obtain.
My adice would be that if you’re in a very specialized field, and opportunities are scarce, you should probably cast your net as wide as possible.
I would say that I’m in a fairly specialized high-tech field and when I was looking for a job 4+ years ago I didn’t get any results from Monster.com. However now that the market has improved (at least compared to the high-tech big bust of 2000) I am getting approached once a month or so for fairly-appropriate opportunites, by people who found me by either Monster or Linked In.
I’ve had a mixed set of luck. Lots of spam from the job sites (not entirely sure which one(s) it came from), but also lots of contacts from recruiters.
My biggest issue, however, is that they don’t seem to read the profiles. I was looking for a full-time direct hire position, but got calls about contracts repeatedly.
That said, I’m at my current job via a job-site posting, and though it started as a contract position, it has morphed into a full time, benefited position.
In the grand scheme, it’s worth the post, but you should be using all the methods, including applying for positions, and networking, in addition to listing your resume on the sites.
