Nearly everyone has heard Albert Einstein's famous quote "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  So why do people insanely continue to spend countless hours posting resumes and responding to jobs advertised on Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, and HotJobs.com?  Why is this insanity?  For one, think about how many jobs you have applied for and how many phone calls you have had?  I'm being very generous here, notice I said phone calls, not how many jobs you've landed from one of these sites.  How many people do you personally know that have even had a call back or interview from a responding to an ad on one of these sites.  My experience, nearly zero. 

To be fair jobs are found on these sites.  In fact Nick Corcodilos published some very interesting data about this on his Ask The Headhunter Blog.   Nick cites data from recent polls and studies by CareerXroads and past data by Forrester that 4% of positions filled were from Monster.com, 3% from CareerBuilder.com, and 1% from Hotjobs.  OK, I want to you analyze this very carefully!  That means a whopping 8% of the positions were filled were a result of an ad on one of the big three job sites. 

Now this is where the insanity comes in.  Most job seekers spend most if not all of their time searching for jobs, guess where... bingo, on these three websites that only have a cumulative success rate of 8%, in fact if you just use Monster.com your probability is just 4%.  But let's dig a bit deeper here.  The stats say a total 8% of jobs are filled from these sites, not that 8 out of 100 people found a job from these sites.  This is from the employer side, where they hired people from.  No one seems to have data on what percentage of people actually find a job through these sites. 



The same study from CareerXroads states that over 68% of jobs are found through networking and referrals.  So why do so many people invest so much time into the job boards?  Simple, 1) it's easy, you can sit at home search and surf through the listings and when you find something interesting you can apply with a couple of clicks and 2) while networking is by far the best way to find a job (especially in today's job market), it is also the most mysterious.  Most people are not natural networkers and few really know how to do it well or where to start. 

For now let's leave it here.  Spending ALL or even most of your time on the job boards is crazy, you will not get different results, it is time to try a new approach.  I highly recommend you check out Molly Wendell's book, The New Job Search available through Amazon.com at our bookstore and maybe some of the other books too.  Molly talks about this at length and has great advice on networking.  We will talk more about networking in future blogs. 

Until then, I wish you the best of luck on your job search.
Bill Grunau