One-Stop Shopping? No, Thank You

These days, online job boards may seem like a great way to find a job. Hey, they’re one-stop shopping for every available job, right?

Job boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com might seem appealing because you can search for jobs, submit your resume and complete your application all in an hour while you are still updating your Facebook status, Twitter status and checking the scores of your favorite sports team, while sitting in your sweatpants.

The problem? In all likelihood, you won’t be doing your job while simultaneously managing your social network. You shouldn’t approach your job search like something you vaguely pay attention to while doing other things. This is not that lecture class you would drag yourself to, but spent the period surfing online and doing the Sudoku in the paper.

I will admit, I fell victim to this way of searching during my own job hunt. And though I tried not to, I often did the Sudoku during Dr. King’s psychology class. The point? Your job search cannot be a one-stop shop. Sure, Monster.com can aggregate a lot of job openings into one place, but this is most certainly not every job available. In fact, the postings on Monster make up only a very small fraction of all the available jobs. According to a recent article in The Economist, a job posting on Monster.com averages about 1,000 applicants. That’s just the average. No recruiter wants or has time to read even a fraction of those.

Job boards may be a good place to start your search, you can read company profiles, learn a little bit about the company make up, but they are certainly not the only place to look. More than that, you probably will not be satisfied with a job that you merely found out of convenience in between doing other things.

Remember, Come Recommended is NOT a job board. Come Recommended users need to have at least three recommendations to have access to its content. When an employer looks at your candidate profile on Come Recommended, he can see your complete profile, your achievements, your work history, and the recommendations from your previous employers. Used correctly, your Come Recommended profile is a complete digital resume. It goes beyond that polished, tailored piece of paper that you are sending out and helps employers see a more robust you.

The other Come Recommended interns will agree with me that the best way to conduct your job search is to make use of all of your resources. Make sure you count your Come Recommended profile as one of them.