Of course I’m talking about the sites like Monster and CareerBuilder and so forth. One of the features that sites like these promote is the ability for employers to search for prospective employees…but honestly, I find it hard to believe that ANY recruiter is going to spend the time and effort to sift through however many hundreds or thousands of profiles to find a good prospect. It just seems like kind of a useless “feature” to tout on such a site.
Still, maybe I’m wrong. Has anyone here (or anyone you know) ever been contacted by a prospective employer after posting a profile on those sites?
Not an offer, but I’ve been contacted by several recruiters who saw my resume on Monster or Careerbuilder – as recently as two days ago. And I don’t think it’s unusual. My understanding is that there is very little “time and effort” required on the recruiter’s part: they have keywords that they search on, and they get alerted whenever a new resume matching one or more of their keywords is posted. Whatever the case, if you have the skills they’re looking for it works.
If you are in engineering or computers or any other technical field, it is very easy for employers to search for keywords to find you. A friend of mine (engineer with 20+ years experience) used to get interview requests periodically from his resume on monster, and we just hired an engineer (fresh out of school) whose resume came from one of those online sites.
I’d have to say no to your question based on the word that I have bolded.
Of course not. Who would offer someone a job without interviewing a person?
But I *have *gotten interviews and I have gotten a job from a job site.
Your idea of how this works is a little off though. They don’t sift through all of those resumes. They use a search feature looking for the key words that they want. On monster, they also have the ability to ask that only resumes that have been posted a month ago, 3 months ago, etc be shown. So one head hunter told me this tip: If you stop getting calls based on your resume on Monster, repost.
Not “offers” in the sense of a "wow, please come and work for us right now!, but I’ve had a few emails to see if I was interested in a role.
Recent ones were for a project manager role in Switzerland - my CV says I speak German so that’s what popped up on the search; and just yesterday I was contacted for a procurement role in social care (it’s also one of the key words on my CV).
For recruiters it’s an easy task to ping off a form email to you, especially (as noted) in more specialist fields where there won’t be a whole bunch of hits for that particular combination (Urdu-speaking hydroengineers with a background in the oil industry, for example)
I never went for an interview, but I was contacted several times by employers interested in interviewing me. They were usually from places I had no desire to move or work (though if I had actually needed a job I would have had a lot more), but they were legit. (I should perhaps mention that this was on a job site specifically for academia.)
Not job offers of course, but interviews, sure. My friends and I get calls and emails from recruiters and occasionally from employers based on our resumes on Monster, Dice, etc.
What kind of jobs are you talking about? For professionals, this is the most common way of getting a job. For unskilled blue collar jobs, not so much.
I got my current job by posting a resume on Dice a couple of years ago. Of course it wasn’t a straight offer, it was an offer to submit another resume, then two phone interviews and hire. I still get a lot of contacts from that one posting, including several late this week.
FWIW Dice is a more specialized Techie version of Monster or the like.
They have a search feature, you know. I search sites for candidates to interview. When I do so I am usually looking for something very specific and the search capability narrows it down to a very manageable number of prospects.
I posted my resume on dice in '05 and was contacted by a headhunter, they sent me on 2 interviews and the 2nd one stuck. They were pushy but also very good at their job, I was happy to see them make money off of me. The same posting also led to another offer direct from the company. And a phone interview for a job in another city but I decided not to pursue that.
Huh. Ignorance fought. I’m a former art director, looking to move up to a creative director position. When I got the art director position, online job search sites were practically nonexistent, so I’m kinda new to this method.
The resume search function is not totally obvious - on the couple of sites I use you have to create an employer account (which is free) and then log in before you can search resumes. You only get part of the resume, not including any contact details, and have to pay a fee to get full details - you pay something like $200 - $300 to be able to see full detail of 50 resumes over a 30 day period. However, the search does search the whole resume, not just the summary, so it will return anything that gives a hit on your search terms.
My current employer contacted me after seeing my profile on my university’s career services website. Been working there nearly 5 years now.
I still have headhunters contacting me regarding my now-completely-out-of-date Monster.com profile, from when I had not even graduated yet.
I should mention that I’m a computer programmer. I have no idea how effective such sites are for other fields.