Today, some 100,000 Internet job boards vie for listings and resumes, double the number in 2000, and the job specific nature of the websites is becoming even more granular.

Need jugglers to entertain passengers on a cruise line? Proship Entertainment and Cruiseline Job are a couple of well-traveled sites for shipboard hiring. A high school football coach? Jobs InSports.com and iCoachUSA.com rank high on recruiters' lists.

Move over CareerBuilder and Monster. Niche job boards continue to proliferate and grow in popularity, giving the top two job boards stiff competition. "While the large job sites provide a breadth of candidates, they result in employers having to slog through hundreds of resumes to find good talent," says Peter Weddle, president of Weddle's, a Stamford, Connecticut-based employment consultancy, and head of the International Association of Employment Web Sites. "Niche sites allow employers to go directly to the A-level performers, who typically focus their job search efforts on specialized search engines."

Niche job boards are growing at a rapid pace. Today, some 100,000 Internet job boards vie for listings and resumes, double the number in 2000, according to Weddle's research. And the job specific nature of the websites is becoming even more granular. "Job sites are slicing and dicing into ever finer gradation," Weddle says. "No longer is it enough to have a job site focused on logistics, for example. It now has to specialize in warehousing logistics or trucking logistics."

The growth of these niche sites results in large part from a recognition that the way to establish an edge over larger, general job boards is to offer more-much more-to those seeking specialized employment. One of the larger niche boards, AllRetailJobs.com, provides help with retail resume writing for job hunters and a "Candidate Tracker" to help employers manage their searches. The site, which says it has nearly 55,000 job listings and 1 million-plus resumes posted, boasts 750,000 unique visitors monthly.

Then there's VetJobs, a niche board aimed at transitioning veterans back into the workforce. It includes a "Spouse Portal" that provides job assistance to veterans' spouses. The site says it attracts 110,000 unique visitors monthly and posts some 37,000 jobs and 120,000 resumes at any given time. Another niche board is Icrunchdata.com, which specializes in 14 specific categories of data and analytics jobs and allows direct application to employers. With 5,000 jobs and 110,000 resumes posted, it says it has 165,000 unique visitors per month.