It depends on the employer, but we do vanity searches to see if any of our employees have their resumes posted. We see these people as flight risks and use that information one of 2 ways: 1) we try to keep the employee or 2) we use this as more fodder for why we want to get rid of the employee.
Also, these resume searches are extremely expensive. I believe our Monster.com resume search cost about $10,000 for a year for unlimited resume searching.
As a recruiter, I can assure you that candidates are continually being hired, even in today’s economy. While those hiring decisions are not solely based upon the resume posting, it’s still a great starting place. Envision Monster, CareerBuilder, etc., as places you can erect your personal billboard for the potential employers to see as they drive by.
The job boards are not our sole source for candidates, but they are searched on a daily basis for either current open positions or for key skills that you deal with on a frequent basis and know that you will have positions that will be coming open at some point in the future.
It was more of an active search though - I found the listing and sent the hiring manager a proper resume and cover letter. It’s been several years but I remember Monster’s “profile” not being that great.
A friend of mine is a programmer, during the 90s when 0s and 1s were king, he posted his resume and got a call while he was still on the site about ten minutes after he put it up.
Well what is it you do? If you are in some sort of technical or professional field, it’s very common. Recruiters can easily do a search for “Series 7” or “.Net” or “CPA” or whatever other criteria they are looking for. If you are a liberal arts major looking for some vauge “job”, not so much.
Art director for 8 years, illustrator/designer for an additional 5. Unfortunately, almost everything I worked on was focused on print publication, so now I’m scrambling to get up to speed on Web apps and design.
I was laid off last August. One of the guys I used to work with was laid off two weeks ago. He said he had 4 interview requests within two days of putting his resume on Monster. I suspect it was within the first week, since he is given to hyperbole, but even so that is pretty good.
I got an interview (and got hired) for an overnight office job with the Wilhelmina Scouting Network, which as it turned out was a scam run by Lou Pearlman. Still, I got paid quite well (for a 20-year-old undergrad) to throw paper aeroplanes around a large empty call center, until the company realized it was under investigation “again” and moved to the next building over.
I found the Dope while killing time at said “job”. 'Nuff said.
Count my ignorance fought, too. I’ve read so many horror stories here and elsewhere about being contacted for what sounded like excellent positions but turned out to be bogus sales/telemarketing jobs, that I assumed it was pointless to actually post a resume.
Edjoin.org seems to have every public school job in California. I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if public schools are actually required to post their jobs there. Employers can also search resumes, and I’ve been contacted for interviews because I came up on hard-to-get key words. Of course, it’s more from schools who had to let someone go in the middle of the year, but it’s happened. I was even offered a job once with only phone interviews (they were in the boonies a bit and I think started the school year without a teacher), but I think that qualifies. Although I think I sent them an app. Does that count?
I’ve been contacted by recruiters who saw my fairly specialized credentials on LinkedIn, which isn’t even a job posting site. A friend of mine with electronics experience and a high security clearance got a bunch of offers from all over the country when he signed up for some service that automatically posts you on about 50 job search sites.
I think it comes down to whether you have credentials or experience that is pretty much in demand and not easy to find.
I got my last two jobs from Craigslist. The one before the current one was perfect, wonderful, my favorite job ever, but the economy crunched down on them, and I had no seniority so even though they liked me a lot, they had to let me go. I just started looking on Craigslist again and got another job.
Geez I’d love to have a job like that. I always wondered how people got “boring” jobs, such as sitting at the desk in the lobby of a closed building at night. I’m never bored as long as I have something to read.