Looking for work

The job search market has changed since the last time I had to look for a job significantly. There was a time when Monster, HotJobs, Career Builder, and Dice seemed to have the market locked up. Now there are more job sites than I can count. The market seems to have fractured into many little pieces.

It is not only the multitude of sites that has changed the landscape but the types of them as well. The big job boards are still around but there is another class of site that has come along, aggregators. These sites are setup to scour the web for job listings. These can come from the big sites, niche sites, corporate job boards, wherever they can think to find them.

But even the aggregators are old hat now. Now it seems that your network is the job hunting frontier. LinkedIn seems to be the leader here. I even read an article the other day suggesting that your LinkedIn profile is your resume these days.

Much has changed indeed. But in many ways it is still all the same. Everyone still wants to look at your resume, all the sites ask for mostly the same information in filling out your profile. It seems to be a strange mix of the old and the new.

How do you go about looking for a job these days? Networking seems to be the new old thing. Getting job leads from coworkers, professional contacts, friends, relatives has been the way many having found their jobs for generations. Now it has a online, social networking, Web 2.0 twist to it.

Maybe this is why the big sites weren't able to keep their dominant positions. They tried to move the job hunt away from who you know to what you know. This is all very well and good but I think the trend in how hire people has gone to a who you are rather than a what you are basis.

The last time I had to search for a new job from scratch was in 2000. It was hard. I focused my efforts on the big sites and didn't make much headway. In the end, the job I found was obtained through an agency. They found me through one of the big sites but in the end it was who I was rather than what I was that landed me the job.