The Internet has made job searching easier and harder at the same. It’s easier to fire your resume off to dozens or hundreds of companies quite quickly and feel like you’ve accomplished something. It’s harder to understand how so many of us got tricked into thinking that this was a good use of our time over the long term.
Of course if it’s easier to email your resume to hundreds of different companies, it’s equally easy for everyone else to do the same thing. The likelihood that you will land a job through this method becomes more remote as more people use them since you’re just competing with a greater number of people for the same jobs. The whole Internet job board phenomenon has gone from being a meet market to a defeat market. I just thought of that.
Even the job board companies themselves now admit this and that’s why the new breed of job boards try to differentiate themselves by catering to niche markets like the $100K+ jobs segment. The people who run these sites arrogantly sniff that only those who offer $100K+ jobs or hold $100K+ jobs are allowed to join this exclusive club. This – we’re led to believe – will help to weed out the unwashed masses who don’t meet the $100K+ requirement either as an employer or job searcher. These are the same unwashed masses who helped to make the company’s earlier online job boards that were open to anyone with a pulse such a success in the first place (a success for the job board companies anyways).
Of course, companies who overstate the income potential for their jobs and people who overstate their income are schemes that are older than mud. People lie and people exaggerate.
How much back checking is done by these $100K+ job boards to ensure that both employers and job candidates are in fact $100K+ material in reality? If I was paying to use this sort of service and wasn’t asked to confirm my $100K+ income with proof up front, I’d be suspect as to the likelihood that the employers I was interested in actually had $100K+ jobs. If these jobs are legit, I’d want the employer to guarantee in writing that I’d be earning $100K+ every year beginning with year one. Afterall, that’s why everyone is paying to use this sort of site in the first place.
