It wasn’t even five years ago that Bobbi Koppel used to regularly place information
on job opportunities in binders for the University of Rhode Island’s 14,000
students to peruse through.
Nowadays, Koppel, director of the university’s Career Services Office, said both students and potential employers are taking a much more Internet-oriented approach to job searching and employee recruiting. But whether a person is seeking a new career or a new engineer, Koppel said the key to success in glut of information in cyberspace
The Internet has long been a safe haven for workers beginning to test the job market and for employers looking to reach a wide pool of candidates inexpensively. But even today, while more than 800,000 jobs are listed on Monster.com and more than 28 million people are registered side users, the success of the cyber job search has often been mixed.
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A year ago, a report from the Technology Association of America said the majority of job seekers found success through networking (61 percent). Internet sites, with success rates ranging from 4 percent to 7 percent, followed newspaper ads (16 percent) and walk-in applicants (9 percent).
That January 2003 survey also said that almost 60 percent of companies that hire through the Internet hired through their own Web sites. The 14.3 percent of companies hiring from the Internet hired largely through Monster.com, although CareerBuilder.com and HotJobs.com are gaining in monthly visits to their sites. The leading sites today work in a similar way, featuring hundreds of job boards that target to specific industries and geographic regions while relying on key words to match job listings and resumes.
Peg Ferguson, assistant director at URI Career Services, said since 2001 the university’s BEACON job site has been powered by MonsterTRAK, a division of Monster.com. The service provides technology and technical support to URI, as well as some of the employer postings through a service that allows companies looking to hire across the college market to buy space on the site.
Ferguson said the job market has really only been dealing in Web-based postings for the past four years, and through those first three years, “the mentality was just to post it out there.” She said over the past year, searching for a new job online has become all about targeting the boards to get the best response. Simply put, someone looking for a job in chemical engineering needs to go to a chemical engineering board.
Ferguson noted that before the Internet became popular, a common career services statistic was that only one-quarter of the job market was visible, while the rest was the hidden market holding jobs that were primarily derived from one-on-one networking. She said even if the Internet has made 40 percent of the job market visible, the majority of the jobs can still be found through networking.
Ferguson said for college students and job changers (who’ve been in their fields for 10 to 20 years), the Internet continues to be one of the first places turned to. At URI, about 2,000 students have registered for BEACON since September, bringing the active pool of users to about 5,000 students (who’ve updated their profiles in the past six months). Regardless of the technology, Koppel said the key to finding a job on- or offline remains marketing yourself and your skills.
“Anyone who doesn’t understand their own skills or what they’re looking for,
the Internet can be daunting,” Koppel said. “Trying to find the job that’s going
to be perfect for me without really knowing what I want can be very frustrating.
The Internet is great for information, but it will never replace real-world
connections.”
