As a prudent member of our evolving workplace, I religiously visit most of the big help wanted sites, CareerBuidlers, Yahoo!HotJobs, etc… I’ve noticed that some jobs and employers are constantly posting the same positions. For examply, on the Washington DC Metro area boards FannieMae seems to be in constant need of Financial Analysts.
Is there really that much turnover in companies like FannieMae, or are these lists just fishing for resumes – many of those boards have a ‘click on this link to email’ and the addresses go through the board, not to the company allegedly advertising.
Not sure about those specific types of listing, but people certainly do use the boards for reasons other than hiring for an immediate need. My husband got what he thought was a call for an interview during his last job search, and it turned out to be someone wanting him to roll his 401k over to his company. What better place to find a pool of people who might need that particular service soon?
I have no doubt that bogus jobs are posted with the goal of harvesting your data so you can be spammed, phished, and junk mailed. Mr. Pug was out of work for two years, and I got to know job boards on an intimate basis. Over the course of that time, I consistently saw the same jobs posted over and over again. The worst offenders were dodgy-sounding companies for whom you could not find Google up a website or an address. FlipDog seemed to carry the most bogus job ads, in my experience.
My first experience with using such a site to look for a summer job was quite sour. There were many postings for an intriguing-looking job with a high but not unbelievable hourly income. There was very little information about what the job entailed; it was in sales (NOT door-to-door sales!), but they didn’t say much else. I don’t know what possessed me to apply for a job in sales (NOT door-to-door sales!), but I sent a resume, and the next day I got a call inviting me to their office. “You’ll be meeting with the manager, so business attire would be appropriate.” Right after that, I found many websites devoted to this company, none of which were positive. The idea was that they recruited nearly anyone who applied to sell knives to family and friends, and some people ended up losing money. Few made the $15/hr they posted, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be one of them. (I’m not mentioning the company, but some people here might have heard of it. I won’t say it’s fraudulent, because I’m sure some people do make money from it, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I was looking for.)
At a job-searching workshop I attended, everything that was said about Internet job-search sites was very negative. It was immediately established as the very worst way to look for a job, and they gave some numbers. (It had to do with 100 people looking for jobs in different ways, and only a few percent of those who used websites found jobs.) They said that the sites make a profit by selling listings to companies, and that there are many listings that are created purely to collect resumes (that is, the job you apply for doesn’t exist). The idea of these sites is so that employers can find the best possible employees far more than it is to help people find the best possible job.
If you want to see what these sites are really about, look at the advertising and the information on their websites intended for employers. Anyone should be able to access the employer side of the websites, and ads directed towards companies can be found in the business sections of many newspapers. It’s a markedly different tone, and it might help you decide whether you think it’s worthwhile to use these sites. If it only takes a few minutes to send off a generic resume to sit in the middle of a pile of 3,000, then maybe it’s worth your time. But if you spend a couple hours writing a customized cover letter and adjusting the details of your resume, your time might be better spent elsewhere.
(BTW, the job-searching workshop said that the best methods were contacting companies directly and joining a job-searching group. Unfortunately, I don’t know if this advice applies to everyone. The workshop as a whole seemed to be blue-collar oriented, and I don’t know how viable these techniques are for, say, an Oracle administrator.)