Muskblog: Homesteading the Internet since 1995

This post is too long, too rambling, and too out of date. Go read Eric Shannon’s guide on “how to land a job at a great company” instead or go read this collection of advice for jobseekers.

Old Information

Besides Monster.com and LinkedIn.com which I’ve already written about a bunch there are a lot of second teir and specialized online job sites out there. Many of which I’ve never looked at until writing this article. If I’ve never tried them I assume most of the blogosphere hasn’t either, hence the posting.

Most companies now direct jobseakers to their own website or to a specific third party who runs their online job application system. As I’ve previously mentioned I’ve helped develop an online job application program which was cleverly titled OJAP but it ran out of funding at some point and I’m not sure if it was ever deployed. So in addition to being an active, educated jobseeker I also have additional insight into what works and does not in online job board development. Some companies like Apple have good internal job sites while others such as the Bank of Montreal do not.

As I’m currently in China but I’m from Vancouver those will be the two geographic areas which feature the most prominently. However most of the big sites cover a considerably wider area. I previously used Monster.com and others when I was looking for work after my undergrad degree. The job I ended up accepting was found the old fashion way in the newspaper. Now even city newspapers are putting their classifieds online.

Canada.com’s Working site is where many major Canadian newspapers will direct you. I searched for a job here, as well as posting my resume and setting up an alert. A lot of jobs I found especially outside Vancouver were posted by head hunters or recruiting firms. I’m not so big on these postings as who I’m working for means a lot to me. This site was slow, especially from China. In fact I could never create an account and I tried a half dozen times, moving on…

Another site my fellow Tsinghua exchange students seem to have tried is Expats.com. Not only can I use it too look for a job, I can use it to find a friend or even a date, or so says the banner. It is free to join so I tried signing up, in the interest of research naturally. It seems more like a dating site, kinda an overseas Friendster. I can’t really recommend this site either, especially if you are looking for work.

Craigslist has been around a long, long time, but I’d never used it until I came to China. My roommate found my ad via craigslist. Craigslist is done by geographic area, there is one for most major cities. I guess I’ll check Vancouver, Seattle, Beijing and maybe Hong Kong. Craigslist has a section comparing online job boards, I never claimed this post was original, it is more like additional motivation to look for work somewhere else other than my school’s career center postings and Monster.com. A lot of the jobs aren’t very appealing at least at the North American sites and I can’t see the company I’d be working for until I click. However I can subscribe to an RSS feed of a category so I figure I’ll try that out too.

Recruitsoft.com, I ended up here by clicking on a job from craigslist. The job I clicked on I may have already applied for via LinkedIn.com but I still like the job funnily enough, even if they aren’t interested in me so I decided to look again and was forced to register for Recruitsoft.com in the process. Apparently I had already registered with their system, possibly while applying for the employment opportunity I found via LinkedIn… Yep an Amazon.com position.

Seattle had by far the most jobs of any of the cities I looked at. craigslist works best if you know exactly where you want to work. I’ve been more focusing on who I want to work for. I have bookmarked a few Vancouver specific jobsites:

• Tech Jobs Vancouver
• Techvibes Jobs Section
• T-net British Columbia

I also had one Chinese specific job site, Zhaopin.com. This last site is a typical busy Asian site, I don’t recall finding any jobs by searching but their many banner ads led me to apply to at least one company previously. Zhaopin and the jobs posted there are really aimed at people who are native or near native Chinese speakers.

Workopolis.com I’ve used before and acts as a service provider to companies taking over the online job posting sections of a firm’s website. This site has an RSS feature by job category. You can also create custom searches and save them. These searches can then be preformed automatically and mailed to you. If only their login would work… I get an ugly page full of variables… Oh well on to the next site.

The next site is T-Net British Columbia. It is a technology related job site, which is one of the areas I’ve been focussing on. T-Net is mostly aimed at developers, when I searched it didn’t have a single posting with the keyword “MBA“.

I monitor several RSS feeds from Tech Jobs Vancouver, they also have sites for other Canadian cities which I should perhaps take a closer look at. I couldn’t seem to subscribe to the feeds for searches like I did for Vancouver, in August with Opera…

Got an email concerning a webcast being put on by CPN: Chinese Professional Network. Since I’m in Beijing this site has more than a token interest to me. I looked into joining and it is not quite as simple as filling out a webform. Your membership has to be approved. I filled out all the forms, cutting and pasting from LinkedIn my information, but I’m still waiting to become a full member.

My school also has my resume available on MBAFocus which is site for recruiters/firms looking to hire MBA students and/or graduates to find a whole bunch of resumes in one place. I didn’t alter my resume in anyway, but I did get to enter some geological and functional requests as well as categorize my experience.

Another site which I’ve seen banner ads for is Dice.com. I don’t know where I’ve seen the ads posibly at Arstechnica. They’ve been around a while and specialize in Tech jobs so I thought I’d give them a whirl while writing this posting. Dice has the agent feature which can be set to daily or weekly.

Given that Monster.com still won’t let me login to check the results of their agent, nor have I expanded the energy in further attempts to contact them, my favourite of the bunch is LinkedIn.com.

February 12th 2006

My mom says that during the Superbowl Careerbuilder.com advertised heavily. Monster.com did a similar thing many years back. The name rings a bell, but since I didn’t specifically try the site for this article I thought I would. As WordPress is still not working correctly for me I’m not using the comment feature which seems to be borked.

Careerbuilder has a feature called Job Alerts this is my preferred method of looking for work online. You enter one or two intelligent searches and let the system do the work for you. Then you can devote your time to writing CVs and networking or blogging or whatever. I quickly found one position at Google, I thought I was a good fit for, but after that I didn’t find much using the exact same search terms.

February 25th 2006

I’m still looking for work, I’m at an even bigger disadvantage as now I am staying with my mom in Deep Bay British Columbia. Monster.com is working better for me now that I’ve given up trying to use it in Opera. I’m using the Canadian, American, and even the Hong Kong version. I’ve also found a couple more Chinese job postings sites that seem to be geared towards ExPats.

ChinaHR.com seems to have some sort of relationship with Monster (Monster International invested 50 million in 2005). Although it claims to have an English version, when I tried to create an account or search for a job I got a whole lot of Chinese. So I can’t really recommend it unless you can tolerate a high amount of Chinese on your screen. You pretty much need to be able to read Chinese to make much use of this site.

Perhaps a better option for English speakers is the Monster Hong Kong “Destination China” website which is run in partnership with ChinaHR.com. You can create search agents which to me is the way to go.

August 28th 2006

Yes I’m still looking for a job and almost exclusively online though I read the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun even the National Post on occasion. Two job posting sites that I’ve been looking at in addition to Monster, LinkedIn, and CareerBuilder are a bit less traditional.

Marketing Sherpa a blog/site I started to follow has a job board. These are all marketing related positions almost exclusively in the US. There are some big name companies but also a lot of smaller companies you’ve likely never heard of. A lot of online marketing, SEO, SEM positions but also more traditional marketing and PR jobs.

Also discovered through the blogosphere and increasingly growing in size and influence is 37signals job board. 37signals is one of the more famous Web 2.0 companies and the jobs posted there are very techie so I resisted checking it, but other bloggers I follow such as Zeldman are adding it to their site. Like Marketing Sherpa it is done as a favour to the community rather than as a business venture. It has RSS feeds and some postings outside the programming and web design niches it primarily serves. If you want to work for a Web 2.0 company or just a regular old Internet company it might be worth a look.

February 9th 2007

Things still haven’t turned around for me. Some things can’t be undone or overcome, especially when people don’t believe you and don’t care. Through Emlyn’s blog I learned of a new website targeting English speaking professionals in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Unfortunately it has appeared about 12 months too late for me perhaps. I haven’t poked around yet, I’m putting a lot of things off until tomorrow, but I thought I should bookmark it and link to it.

March 9th 2007

Of late some recruiters have contacted me, I’ve tried to focus on full time employment, I have heard out a few recruiters about short term contracts. Some of them are just not in my best interest. Yesterday someone from West Pacific Consulting Group called, I think they wanted me to move to Calgary, which I am dead against having done that twice before for co-op workterms. Another large recruiter which was recommended to me by Trevor Baker finally contacted me today by email. They seem to be much larger, covering a greater geographic area, but they also seem to specialize in short term consulting jobs. TekSystems also has a sister firm that specializes in Finance and Accounting professionals, TekSystems is IT focussed, Trev is a Java Developer. Although I now have the names of several TekSystem recruiters, considering I’m pursuing a CFA now I plan to investigate Stephan James Associates more carefully. I learned of another professional staffing agency through an ad in the National Post called ZSA, it is probably of interested to anyone Legal or Financial Services.

TekSystems and Stephan James Associates both use the same online job posting site called: thingamajob.com.

June 30th 2007

I actually accepted a job offer and tried to make it work, but it has not, they accepted me on a contract basis but have decided for a variety of reasons, including my boss returning to Korea, that they need someone different in the position, someone who can actually speak Korean. So I may use some of these resources I carefully collected. Someone wrote me asking them to add another site called CareerJet, so what the hell it probably helps with their search engine optimization.

It is also nice to know some people don’t consider Muskblog part of an undesirable neighborhood and some people actually want to meet and talk with me… I wish the wee Chinese lass in the gym was one of them, but I once again have bigger problems. I’m continuing to stay away from my Sauder MBA classmates, it just isn’t worth the risk nor the pain.

August 21 2007

All it seems I do since I started the second half of my Sauder MBA at UBC is look for work. I have no idea how many job postings I’ve looked at let alone applied to. I can’t say I’ve benefited from my time at the Sauder School of Business, I definitely did not benefit from going out of my way to help my classmates, especially those that said they were my friends. People in my class said they would help me, but now they generally don’t answer my emails…

There are a lot of recruiters, but I can’t say any of them have ever gone out of their way to help me. Generally I like to know who I will be working for. One recruiter whose job postings I’ve applied to lately is Holloway Schultz & Partners. They have the www.recruiters.com URL, which shows some foresight.

This entry was originaly posted on January 15th, 2006, it was last edited on January 22nd, 2013 and is filed under: Blogging, CFA, China, Internet, MBA, Online Social Networks, Sauder, Self Marketing, Tsinghua, Vancouver and tagged: 37signals, advice, Apple, Asian, Bank of Montreal, Calgary, CareerBuilder.com, cover letter, Craigslist, Dice.com, Eric Shannon, Friendster, job search, jobseeker, LinkedIn, Monster.com, resume, RSS, search agents, TekSystems, thingamajob.com, unemployed, Workopolis.