By Bryan Fife
bry@newsroom.byu.edu
Web sites that offer career tools and services give students many resources to find the job they desire after graduation.
According to Forbes magazine, in 1995 there were about 300 web sites offering career services--now there are nearly 3,000 such sites. The large number of sites allows students more advantages in finding the jobs they desire.
Krista Mortensen, a career placement advisor at BYU, said that one of the advantages of career service sites is that employers are able to post jobs on these sites 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so students are able to find out about jobs quicker. She also said students can use them to contact employers in a matter of seconds.
Career web sites allow keyword searches for jobs in specific industries or geographic locations. Some sites even allow searches for jobs at specific salary levels. The site www.careerindex.com is a site that accesses job-search databases from other web sites, allowing users to search over one million jobs.
A valuable feature of some job-search web sites is that they allow users to receive e-mail updates of available jobs that match specific criteria determined by users. A site that offers a daily e-mail update service is www.4work.com. A site that offers a weekly e-mail update service is www.careershop.com.
Some sites allow users to search for jobs with specific companies. The Career Paradise site, located at www.emory.edu/CAREER/Implementation/Hiring.html, allows users to link to actual human resource/recruitment pages within specific corporate or non-profit organizations' web sites. The site www.hotjobs.com lists only jobs posted by Fortune 500 companies within specific industries.
Many career sites allow students to post resumes. America's Job Bank site, located at www.ajb.dni.us, allows one to create cover letters in addition to posting resumes. This site even gives users a personal account to track their job searches.
Krista Mortensen also said that a beneficial feature of many career web pages is that they give employer profiles so that users may e-mail employers with questions or requests for additional information.
The web site, Monster.com, located at www.monster.com, contains employer profiles, as do other sites such as the American Job Bank, and the Career Shop.
Further information about career service web sites can be obtained in Forbes magazine's special edition titled, Best of the Web, which will be available on May 15. Forbes recently judged career service web sites and chose the sites they thought were the 'best.' The judging applied five criteria: design, navigation, content, speed and customization. The print version of the special edition features 260 sites.