Online Job Boards: Poisonous to Your Health

I am not a fan of online job boards of any variety. Just a few days ago I perused the Careerbuilder web site (out of desperation) and I was quickly reminded why. Bait and switch jobs have run amok. The military is clearly determined, and the "work at home" cartel are audacious. Page 1 of my search was quickly scrolled to the bottom and clicked for the next page. Page two was no different, so I clicked to page three, and four, and five....

...I gave up. This is insane. The old school versions of Monster and Careerbuilder was tolerable, as you can find at least two legitimate jobs. Now, even if there are legitimate postings, they are incredibly hard to find because of the necessity to weed out the bullcrap. No thanks. If I'm going to weed out anything, it will be from my garden, and nothing else.

From what I've read, however, more and more people have removed the rose-tinted glasses when it comes to internet job boards as far as reliability. Even recruiters have started confessing (slowly but surely) that job boards haven't been all that successful as far as reaching out to potential candidates. Sadly, even the local newspapers don't even have their own classified section online anymore, instead they have proudly advocated "partnerships." The Chicago Sun-Times and Herald News have partnered with Monster. The Daily Herald and Gatehouse Media have partnered with Yahoo's Hot Jobs. When these papers made the initial announcement of such partnerships, perhaps they didn't realize it was more to their benefit than the jobseeker. Since they cannot get enough orders for help wanted ads in their own right, they have resorted to desperate measures. This partnership is a logical idea on a revenue sense since classifieds are well below last year's figures due to hiring freezes and overall lack of jobs. They have to get the revenue from somewhere, but to allude jobseekers that there are plentiful jobs is a complete farce. These boards are damaging on both ends, and serves absolute no purpose except to achieve the goals of their advertisers.

It is now being suggested to stay clear of the major job boards, only to stick with job boards that pertain to your field (as in, "niche" job boards). That's wonderful and all, but unfortunately we are still dealing with the internet. I have come across peculiar job postings on mediabistro and journalismjobs.com that is considered head-scratch worthy. On several occasions I've come across job postings where the header read one thing and the job description read another (mostly alluding to sales). I still come across the "unknowns" as in, "Company Confidential," or "Company Unknown." As long as they are online job boards of any sort, there will always be the useless spam of some sort.

That's the one thing I've always hated about the internet. It makes everything very unpersonable and way out of reach. Come across a job posting that's the job of your dreams? Well you have to fill out an online application, go through tons of servers, and get a generic, electronic auto-response that's blandly worded as if they're trying to give you the warm fuzzies. And maybe....just maybe...the user on the other end of the line is talented enough to punch those magic words to make your resume appear on their computer like magic....otherwise you will never get a human response. This lack of interaction is toxic. 

I prefer the old school way of doing things. Talk to everyone you know (I don't mean Facebook and especially LinkedIn). Get your ass off the couch and drive around for any hints of help being wanted. Get that company's information. Conduct the search manually and cold call. Send flowers. Bake them a cake. You never know...sometimes radicalism works!