Finding Job Postings Using Google

This blog entry is another in the series from guest bloggers through the Recruiting.com blogswap. Today’s guest is Steven Rothberg, President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a high traffic career site used by candidates who are searching for entry level jobs and internships.

A lot of candidates who are conducting a job search for the first time or perhaps the first time in years are astounded at the options available to them to find job posting ads. There are about 40,000 job boards, the vast majority of which focus on a specific niche and therefore are not household names. There are general job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder, and Yahoo! HotJobs; niche sites like CollegeRecruiter.com that focus on experience level; niche sites that focus on occupational fields; niche sites that focus on geographic locations; and vertical search sites such as SimplyHired and Indeed that copy jobs from many of the job boards and allow you to search the jobs all in one place.

So why shouldn’t candidates just go to a site like Monster and then perhaps Indeed to search for all of the job openings out there, apply, and wait for the phone to ring? Simple: none of the sites comes close to listing all of the jobs which are relevant to any particular job seeker. In fact, some 90 percent of job openings go unadvertised, so even if you do a great job of searching on-line for advertised job openings, you’re likely missing 90 percent of the openings. To get to those 90 percent, you have to network. To get to the 10 percent as completely as possible, you have to look at a variety of sites. Yes those sites include job board such as Monster and CollegeRecruiter.com, but not many job seekers think of running searches at sites such as Google. Yet Google is an excellent source of information for job seekers. Don’t believe me? Try it out.

Let’s say that you’re conducting an entry level job search and are looking in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Why Calgary? It is one of the most beautiful areas in the world due to its location on the western edge of the Canadian Prairies and the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies, which are some of the tallest and most rugged mountains in the world. Did someone say world class downhill skiing 20 minutes from your door? I thought they did. In addition, Calgary has one of the hottest economies in the world right now because Alberta sits atop more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia has, although Alberta’s oil is more difficult to extract than those in Saudi Arabia. But let’s go back to Google. If you type in entry level job search Calgary, you’ll see immediately see links to sites that have information on entry level job openings in Calgary, including a lot of job boards that specialize in those positions and employers who have those positions available.

Want another example? Let’s say that you’re searching for an entry level job in engineering. Head over to Google and type in entry level job search engineer and you’ll be taken to sites that have information on those types of positions. Convinced? Great, because this strategy works with any search engine and any type of job search.

When you’re searching for a job, you need to look upon that search as a job. So don’t just post your resume in one or two places and wait for the phone to ring. Get aggressive. Think differently than most job seekers. Network. And use the search engines because they’re great tools for job seekers, even if those job seekers have bad knees like mine, so are relegated to enjoying the ski chalets rather than zipping down the hills.