Asked By: 2Cool - 10/9/2006

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I have not been unemployed for a single day since I finished my US Army enlistment in 1997. Every job I have held was found through online job banks. I got my first one in November 1996, while I was getting ready for leaving the Army. I got that job from a web site called Online Career Connection, which was later bought by Monster.

All the other jobs I have held were found through Monster, Cyber Coders and others.

What to expect?

1. If you are in a hot career and your resume has a lot of relevant keywords, you will be pestered to death by asshats (more about that below).
2. Every time you update your online resume, the asshats will strike again.
3. If your resume is poorly written it will be as if you did not post it at all.

About the asshats:

Here is how Monster makes money: you as a job searcher get most of their basic services for free. They will charge you a little bit of money for some premium features, or a lot of money for their hardcore stuff. I believe the little bit they charge you to highlight your resume is money well spent.

Monster also makes money because it charges for access to the full contents of your resume, and it charges for posting job ads plus regular ads for ancillary services (resume writing, coaching, etc).

This presents a problem because the access charge for resume is staggered. That means that any asshat can go to monster and for very little or no money pull a list of names, emails and phone addresses of 400 people that have the words "web programmer" in their resume. No measure how good these 400 are, so what they do, being asshats, is do a lot of cold calling.

They will call you, say they saw you on monster, and you are the perfect match for a bunch of jobs they are recruiting for. Oh, and would you please email them a current copy of their resume?

That's the trap.

Of course, you are thinking who gives a crap? I need a JOB. The problem is that depending on your buzzword content, you may be talking 20 calls a day. This means that these 20 asshats will keep the real recruiters from reaching you by phone.

What to do about this?

1. Try to talk to the principal. The principal is the guy that needs to fill the opening. That means either the manager that ordered the job posting, or his HR, or a recruiter specifically hired to fill the opening.

2. As soon as they try to ask you for your resume, two minutes after saying they got your resume off Monster, hang up. Let him call again and hang up again. Or put him on hold and go take a walk. Make him waste his time as punishment for wasting yours.

3. Assume that every time you update your online resume, you will get a bunch of early calls from the asshats. The real recruiters will call you at more decent hours since they actually go to work. The asshats are cold callers, so they work very early to try to get a jump start on the others.

4. Do not allow a recruiter to shove you into an interview for a job posting that you are not comfortable with. Here's an example: I am a web programmer. My specialties are Microsoft's asp and asp.net, and php. I have ZERO experience in Java. I had a recruiter that lied to me and conned me into going to his office with the excuse of an asp job. He hands me the posting, it is titled SENIOR J2EE PROGRAMMER. Big bold letters. I told him, he waved it off as it was not a problem and I could teach myself Java in two weeks. I walked away.

5. Keep an eye for duplicate postings across job sites. You don't want to apply to the same job five times in the same day because you couldn't spot the five sites were posting the same job.

6. If you see the post multiple times, try to figure out which post would cost the employer less if you reply to it. There are strings attached to some of the job sites, so answering the "right" multiple posting may save your boss a few hundred bucks. Make sure your soon to be new boss knows you did this to prove that you are considerate.

7. Recruiters get paid a ?f your entry level offer salary. Most recruiters doesn't give a shit about you, about how well you will match, etc. All he cares is that you nail that job and that the offer comes out as high as possible, because that will maximize his commission. Here in DC less than one in ten recruiters actually care enough about their jobs to do this right, I have dealt with a couple that are fantastic at what they do and they are embarrassed of how his peers play the system with no regard for the candidate.

8. Be nice to the recruiters that don't waste your time. Don't wave them off just because they can't help you. Keep their contact information in case somebody else needs a job, those recruiters usually pay a finder's fee.

Good luck with the job hunt. My worst one so far was early this year. I got lay off notice in January, and was given 90 days to find a new job before the layoff was official. I got TWO (one lead off Monster, one lead off the Washington Post jobs site) offer letters four hours before my layoff was going to be declared official, so basically I beat unemployment by four hours! I have had the new job for exactly 6 months and it rocks.

Answered By: veraperezp - 10/9/2006