Don’t believe the hype when it comes to job search and career management information.
There is a popular Internet job board that advertises on the radio whose ads kind of make me laugh. Their commercials are typical of some of the stuff we hear from people in the job search and career management game.
The commercials always focus on telling people how easy it is for hiring companies to post job ads on their website to find “great staff” and how equally easy it is for job searchers to post their resume for free to find a “better job.”
The commercials use humorous characatures of hiring managers and job searchers – basically exaggerated stereotypes – to show some of the stiffs that exist in the world that many of us have probably bumped into at one point or another in our careers.
Basically, they’re trying to show hiring managers that these sorts of stiffs don’t post resumes in their database while also showing job searchers that these losers don’t post jobs on their website either.
So on the one hand, they tell people how easy it is for anyone to post a job or resume on their website but on the other hand that their website features only a select group of hiring companies and job searchers.
Obviously, the two are conflicting points. I guess it isn’t obvious to them because they’ve been running these ads for a few years now.
Anyone can post a job on an Internet job board.
Anyone can post a resume on an Internet job board.
Internet job boards don’t guarantee any sort of exclusivity or guarantee that only decent companies and skilled job searchers are using them.
In fact, they promote the opposite. That’s why people were to them as monster boards. They try to cast a wide net and sign up as many people as possible. It’s about quantity.
Posting jobs and resumes on job boards is a formality for people these days just like companies once posted ads in the local newspaper when they needed to hire someone even though they knew it would result in them getting dozens if not hundreds of resumes, most of which weren’t suited to the job.
I dealt with one client in the early 2000s who still put every single IT job they had available in the local paper because it was “company policy” as I was told. They’d wait for 3 weeks to weed through the resumes the ad produced and then they’d start working with recruiters like me to help them actually fill the job.
It was the same process every time: pay for an ad in the newspaper that they knew wouldn’t work, and then pay a recruiter like me to help them actually fill the job.
I helped them place 3 people within one year. All three jobs had previously been advertised in the paper, obviously unsuccessfully.
Can you get a job (or hire a person) through an Internet job board?
Of course.
You can probably still get a job or hire a good person through a newspaper ad, too. I got a job from a newspaper ad so I know it can happen.
The point is to set your expectations and don’t allow people to set them for you. Be realistic with your expectations especially as it pertains to what you can accomplish with various career services regardless of how they are promoted.
