Job Seeker Information

The security breach at a major online job board last year may have made you a little hesitant to put your resume into online databases for fear that your contact information will be used for money-making purposes such as direct mail or email marketing or even identity theft. However, there are security measures you can take that will make your search for internet jobs more secure.

There’s always the option of just not putting your resume on the Internet at all, but that’s going to saddle you with a pretty large disadvantage in that recruiters that use the internet to find candidates won’t be able to find you!  Instead, you will have to proactively monitor many different job boards, looking for companies that are looking for you.  It’s a lot easier to find candidates for a recruiter when they can search through online databases looking for skill sets that match yours and contacting you about unadvertised job openings.  If the case is that you want to be easy to find, you’ll have to post your resume, so how can you do that and ensure that the boards you post to are legitimate and have precautions in place to ensure the safety of your information?

Always make sure that you feel confident before you post a resume to a internet jobs website.  Read their privacy policy carefully, primarily to figure out where they may repost your resume, or who they may sell it to.  If they do redistribute it to other sites, do you trust those sites, as well?  The best way to get answers to these kinds of questions is to email or call the board directly.  You can even log in as an employer and research all their policies on resume searching.  These boards want your resume- it’s a large part of how they make money- so any one that’s any good will accommodate your requests without a problem.

Once you’ve decided which board(s) you trust enough to post your resume to, take proper precautions when applying to jobs and responding to email solicitations. Job boards work hard to ensure that only legitimate jobs are posted, however, it’s near impossible to catch every single one of those “spam” job postings that may get through the filters. What this means to you is that you must keep an eye out for fishy jobs and emails. The old adage is truer than ever on the Internet- if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Never, ever give out your social security number or bank account information. An employer should never ask for that information via email, and a job board will not ever ask you for that information either, as is stated in most of their Privacy Policies.

If you do get a scam or “phishing” type of email and are able to deduce from what job board the sender got your information, it’s in everyone’s best interest for you to let the job board know as soon as possible, and give them as much information about said scam and the person who contacted you as possible.  You can also report fraudulent looking job postings.  The more aware the job boards are of potential rip-offs, the better job they can do to prevent them in the future.

By knowing what internet jobs sites ere your resume is posted on, doing your due diligence in regards to security measures and keeping an eye out for fraud, you can help keep yourself and your personal information safe while conducting an online job search.

Lots of people ask me for basic information about Internet jobs and online job searching.

Finding jobs, especially internet jobs online requires basic knowledge of how to surf the Internet.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of job boards and job sites. There are geographically specific job boards, niche job boards by industry, or job function, boards focused on part-time jobs and even religious based sites.

Finding the specific job boards isn’t difficult.

A quick search on Google for “Job boards”, or “Jobs”, will bring back more than enough career centers.

There are Industry specific job boards, such as Accounting, management, purchasing, and even sales job boards. Many of these job boards are relatively smaller, compared to big job boards, so there are advantages to using these sites.

When searching for jobs online, it’s important to remember to be efficient with your time. Chances are there will be a lot of job board results, and hopefully, many of these will be tailored specifically to the type of search that you are performing.

One of the benefits of an online job search is the ability to create job agents. These are simple “reminders” that usually send you email when jobs meeting your criteria come up. One thing to note is that it’s important to test your job search criteria. For instance, if you add too many search criteria, you may get limited, or no results. If you create too broad of criteria, you get a lot of jobs that aren’t relevant.

Posting a resume online is also unique to online job searching. This is a great feature, but can also be a little cumbersome. For instance, most big employers want you to post your resume on their corporate website. Well this isn’t that difficult, it’s just time consuming.  Follow my advice and you’ll be finding internet jobs in no time!

Be sure to continue the process of building up a social network, because while you might spend a significant time looking for Internet Jobs, statistics still show that 65% of people are still hired through referrals.