GMA: Tiffany Shlain on Job Hunting

— -- Many Good Morning America viewers have written in requesting guidance to the best sites for job hunting on the Internet.

Specifically, many of you want to know the best sites to search for a job and post your resume. In most cases, we’re talking about “Job Boards” when we talk about job hunting on the Internet — places where job seekers can post their resumes and find job opportunities, and where employers can find resumes and post job opportunities. Essentially, job boards are communities on the Internet. They allow people to communicate a common need, and they depend almost entirely on the people who use them. So, like many Internet communities, their strength depends on the size of the community. Simply put, the more people who are aware of it, the better it becomes.

Bigger Is Better

So it shouldn’t be a big surprise to learn that two of the best job boards on the Internet are sites you may already know about: HotJobs.com, and Monster.com. Both sites are very well advertised. Perhaps you recall Monster.com’s Super Bowl commercial featuring children saying things like “I wanna get paid less for the same job.” The advertising effort has made both sites a common destination for job hunters and employers and it’s created a strong community. Of course, this has happened because both sites have great features to keep visitors happy and returning. They feature career tips, relocation information, newsletter services, and of course, thousands upon thousands of opportunities. However, lesser-known sites can be helpful, too. At CareerShop.com, for example, you can enter your job criteria and then have it search more than 30 different job boards (including Monster.com and HotJobs.com) to find many more opportunities than you’ll find at just one site. It too offers complimentary services and advice while saving you the trouble of typing the same job search information into each separate job board. The downside is that when you post a resume here it’s not accessible at the 30 sites on which you can search for jobs, though it is available to employers that receive information from CareerShop.com.

Staying Local

Lastly, many local community sites offer local job listings as well. In the San Francisco Bay Area (where I live), CraigsList.org has been the de facto standard for house hunting and job hunting since its inception in 1996. In fact, it also offers personal ads, event listings, items for sale, and much more. Ultimately it has created a powerful local community that attracts people for many more reasons than job hunting. That attraction has created an incredibly vibrant community (good enough to be nominated for a 1999 Webby Award in the Community category), which has in turn made the job-listing portion of its site the first stop for any Bay Area job hunter. Best of all, CraigsList.org has recently expanded to Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., San Diego and Seattle. As people in these cities gravitate to their local CraigsList.org sites, those sites stand to become powerful job resources as well. Good luck in your job search, and remember that unemployment is still at an all-time low, so job-hunters are a valuable commodity.