The biggest Jobhunting websites (the ones with the most traffic) are America's Job Bank, CareerBuilder, CareerMosaic, CareerPath.com, Headhunter.net, HotJobs.com, JobOptions, and Monster.com.  The list is seemingly endless, depending on how far you want to go with it.  And while you should also use smaller, niche-oriented Employment sites for your targeted searches, I'm focusing on these larger sites for the next few days.

What should you expect from these Industry leaders that need your participation to stay on the top of the online recruiting heap?  Typically, they should have:

·         Free resume postings

·         Search engines that can find your dream Job by title and location

·         Automated resume creation and storage for future updating

·         Job search-bots that finds matches to your resume and emails you the url

·         Career advice, strategies, feedback, etc.

America's Job Bank is a collaborative effort of the Department of Labor and the Public Employment Service.  Its most notable feature is an excellent search engine that can search by keyword, location, Job type, experience or education requirements, salary, or age of the ad itself.  Results are sortable by combinations of the aforementioned qualifiers.

Job Bank uses 'scouts' as search-bots, which notify you when a match is made to your submitted resume.  This site is also well known for a huge database of statistical information about the labor market - what Jobs are in demand, at what salary, and trends for the immediate future in a variety of fields.  Resumes created here should remain in plain text.  Nearly 1 million Jobs are posted on this site.

CareerBuilder has a healthy search engine built into it, just like Job Bank.  It allows searches by a similar set of criteria - keywords, location, title, salary, etc.  Though it lacks resume posting and creation services, Careerbuilder does have a section where you can apply for Jobs while online (cutting and pasting resume info, or by attaching a word document).

Some of the best career advice is on this site, and their section on Company Financial Information rivals Hoover's for thoroughness.  CareerBuilder has almost 100,000 Jobs listed at any one time.

Tomorrow, we continue our look at the Top Eight Websites for Jobhunters.

-Mark Poppen

Rose McGinnis is a smart woman. She's the recruiting manger of SCT Corporation who got 300 people to apply for jobs in just 4 hours.

The people didn't even need resumes. In fact, they didn't even need clothes.

Expect others to follow suit.

The way SCT worked it was they ran an ad in the paper and on the Howard Stern show. The idea? You called in, were screened by a recruiter, and passed onto the hiring manager for the department you'd work in if you were hired.

Better yet, it all happened over the course of a weekend. Hunters didn't need to take time off from their other job or miss finals at school. They didn't have to drag out the map and learn an easy route to the company. They could lay abed and be interviewed.

Another company with a clue.

Their dial-a-thon is over now. But, they're still at work. Their employment opportunities page offers a good insight into the type of company they are.

It's dense with text, but you can tell they know what they're doing. Sure, there's a jobs page. But there's also a description of the training programs, career development opportunities, and their SCT Academy.

Fuzzy Bunny Slippers

November 14, 2000

Take it from someone who's seen it firsthand: taking a job at that little startup down the road is about more than just holding out until the stock vests.

Larger, established businesses are usually in a position to offer benefits and luxuries to prospective employees that neophyte dot-coms can't always match& benefits like a regular work schedule, a fair "working definition" of the position to be filled, and the ability to slack once in a while - all with the luxury of a steady paycheck.

Of course, there is a system of checks and balances. Taking a job in a more traditional work environment may mean sacrificing creativity, individuality, or the general ability to show up to work at noon in your favorite fuzzy bunny slippers, confident that no one in the office will bat an eye. However, you're pretty well assured that you're seldom going to be watching the "wrong side of sunrise" over the top of your monitor and dreading the impending arrival of your co-workers because they got to leave last night and it's your goddamn coffee in that pot.

It all depends on your limitations, be they physical, emotional, psychological, or moral.

The world of start-ups can be vicious, cutthroat, and extremely brutal. You may see close friends get fired and be too busy picking up the slack generated by their sudden absence to be able to mourn their loss. It takes a certain type of individual to successfully survive the start-up experience.

So before you take that job, ask yourself: "Just how much do my fuzzy bunny slippers mean to me?"

-Greg Pryor

Surfing Lessons

November 13, 2000

Learning to look for information on the Web can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of a job hunt.

The Internet is a great source for getting general information. Finding specifics, however, can be an exhaustive process of trying to find a haystack in a mountain of needles. Getting thousands of responses to a query on a search engine can be overwhelming; annoyance sets in shortly after you realize that most of what came back has nothing to do with what you were looking for.

Beyond doing away with frustrations, making effective use of a search engine can help in locating jobs, companies, and resources good towards streamlining the search for employment. Searching techniques are quick to learn, easy to master, and highly portable. Learning these skills while looking for a job is a great investment: searching the web is good for a variety of applications.

It doesn't have to be trial and error, help is available. Tutorial sites like The Spider's Apprentice will teach you some of the ins and outs of using search engines to their potential. Written with the user in mind, these tutorial sites tend to give the straight dope in lay terms- good news for those of us that get headaches from technical jargon.

Take some time to learn the art of surfing. It's a time-saver.