While you'll miss out on many top jobs if you spend 100% of your efforts online, there ARE great positions out there for the browsing! In addition, it's a quick way to research your ideal position, plus get solid keywords for your resume.
Use these strategies to find better-than-average opportunities—and increase your search ROI:
1) Tap into professional organizations in your industry. For example, a Google Search for "IT industry Association" yielded not only siaa.net (Software & Information Industry Association) and tiaonline.org (Telecommunications Industry Association), but http://www.google.com/Top/Business/Information_Technology/Associations/, (Google's MASTER list of IT associations).
What can you do with such a list? For starters, many of these organizations will allow free searches on their jobs database. Some also publish trade magazines that contain advertisements for open positions. In addition, you can often find local chapters that might be running a networking event or meeting.
BONUS: should you decide to join, professional affiliations are a GREAT place to find like-minded individuals who are hiring in your field—plus, the membership can be a boost to your resume.
2) Consider some of the fee-based services for job searching. Many high-powered jobs and confidential listings are shown exclusively on executive sites such as Execunet (Execunet.com), NetShare (Netshare.com), and ExecutivesOnly (executivesonly.com).
While some of what these sites may offer more than you need, registering with one or two can help broaden your search efforts and give you a representative cross-section of what employers seek. Some organizations, such as Execunet, promote face-to-face networking opportunities through local chapters.
In addition, registering on BlueSteps (bluesteps.com) is often required by recruiters who want to review your resume.
3) Locate composite job engines for your chosen field. Narrowing your search to niche job boards can produce a higher rate of return than using the "mass marketing" boards such as CareerBuilder or Monster, since the jobs are often of better quality and not as well-visited.
Some niche boards contain MORE listings, since their fee structure is more attractive to employers. Finding these sites sometimes means paging through search engine results for your industry plus the word "jobs."
The following is a sampling of focused job posting, association, and recruitment sites, listed by industry:
IT - Just Tech Jobs (justtechjobs.com), Developers.Net (developers.net)
Nonprofit - ASAE CareerHeadquarters (careerhq.org), The NonProfit Times (nptimes.com)
Engineering - Society of Women Engineers (swe.org), ContractJobHunter (cjhunter.com)
International - PlanetRecruit.com (planetrecruit.com), Job Shark (jobshark.ca)
Construction - Construction Executive (constructionexecutive.com)
Biotechnology - HireBio (hirebio.com)
To sum up, finding a reliable and quality source of leads—whether from online or offline resources—can take a bit more ingenuity and time, but will pay off by producing better results for your career search.
