The Internet: Making it Part of Your Job Search

The Internet, of course, has become an ever-increasingly valuable resource for job seekers. There are several reasons for this.

The Web allows you to:

Quickly search and respond to thousands of electronic want ads from employers around the world.
Post job requests to electronic bulletin boards read by potential job providers.
Communicate via email and discussion groups with future interviewers and fellow job seekers.
Make your resume widely available to the Internet community.
Demonstrate a little computer savvy to your future employer.

How Is an Internet Job Search Different?

Conceptually, looking for employment through the Internet parallels and should be part of your traditional job search. In both methods, you need to assess your strengths, prepare a resume and cover letter, and generate job leads. In both methods, you want to get your resume in circulation with a pool of future employers. And in both the real world and the Internet, your objective is to get people to read your resume and give you a face-to-face interview. (Despite what you may have heard about the wonders of the computer world, it has yet to render the interview obsolete.)

What is different about an Internet job search is that the Net offers you more opportunities to get in touch with employers than ever before. With the Internet, you will see more "employee wanted" notices than a hundred different Sunday newspapers could provide, and you will be able to use online services to search through those notices for the jobs you want a thousand times faster than you could with the classifieds.

In addition, the Internet offers inexpensive ways to make your resume or job request available for easy viewing by the growing number of employers using the Net to find employees. When potential employers see your online resume or job request, they can quickly ask for more information or arrange for interviews by email.

Making Your Resume Available on the Internet

Once you have had a chance to poke around the Internet, you will notice that everyone and her grandmother has a page out there. Why not get one yourself? With your resume online as a Web page, you can make its address available through email, newsgroups, or even printed on your business card. A Web resume not only has the potential to reach a very wide audience, it also shows that you are hip to today's technologies.

These days it's quite common to post a personal profile, with a resume and perhaps a portfolio, on social networking websites.

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