04 February,2009 06:52 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
The Web is a great tool but right now it may not be the best place to hunt for a job
If you have been reading iT ADDA for any length of time, you will know that we generally glorify technology. But this article is a bit of an anti-technology piece because we are telling you that the last place to turn to for a job is the Internet.
No, we are not saying that the Internet is a useless tool. What we are saying is that the big problem with the Internet as a job search tool is that everybody is using it today.
Shooting upward
According to comScore, which has recently released a list of the top 10 gaining site categories by percentage change in unique visitors in the US, job search, which stood at over 12 million in December 2007, shot up to almost 19 million by December 2009 a staggering rise of 51 percent.
Today, this seems to be one of the few sectors that is still doing well. In fact, in February 2009, the Global Market Development Centre launched a new online interactive job board called the GMDC JobCentre that focuses on wholesalers, retailers, manufacturers and marketers of the general merchandise and health-beauty-wellness industries. A site called theladders.com, which lists jobs that pay at least $100,000, said the number of subscribers has spiked 63 per cent in the US in the past one year.
Just to be on the safe side, we also decided to do our own research by visiting compete.com to check out how job sites are doing. As a sample, we decided to check out how monster.com, jobstreet.com and naukri.com are performing. We found out that monster.com was the big one with over 26 million unique visitors in December 2008, followed by jobstreet.com and naukri.com, which had in excess of fifty thousand and twenty eight thousand hits respectively.
And while Monster.com registered a growth of over 48 per cent from December 2007 to December 2008, jobstreet.com and naukri.com also registered growth of over 18 and 13 per cent respectively. While monster.com and jobstreet.com are showing some percentage loss at a monthly level, on a yearly level they are showing good growth.
Why go offline?
As all these figures clearly show, everybody is using the Internet to search for a job. And this raises one big question what are the chances that you will be able to get a job by competing with everybody else? While there are still chances, the best bet would be for you to take the offline route.
Four offline tips on how to get a job
>> Meet old friends and keep in touch over the phone. Face to face meetings have a strong recall value and you want people to think of your name first when there is any job opening
>> Try to establish contact with HR managers. They are the ones who truly matter
>> Leverage the advantage of personal referrals. If somebody at a company knows you, one word from that person is worth a thousand words in your CV
>> Phone people regularly to check out the status of your job application. Don't send e-mail everybody's mailbox is probably already overflowing with CVs
