Building a Career?

My methodology said to Google the job board first.  Career Builder definitely comes out a winner here. 

They come up with 5 entries before the search disintegrates into other entries.   Monster and Indeed only scored 4.  The Wikipedia entry tells me that Career Builder is the largest job board with 23 million unique visitors/month and 34% market share.  That’s pretty good press when you consider that Indeed is only tagged as a "metasearch engine for job listings launched in November 2004" (makes it sound kinda ancient) and even worse - Monster Wikipedia says “is any fictional creature, usually found in legends or horror fiction”. 

Got it.  Career Builder is great at being Googled.

But more important, what do I think when I take my biased look.   Let’s look.   First page:  we have the usual keyword and location boxes for the search.  Also on this page is a listing of recently posted jobs,  and a boxed selection of other categories – Search by Audience, Careers by Category and Jobs by Company, Industry and Job Title.   AND…running down the right side of the page a list of ads. 

Frankly I am not impressed.  The currently listed jobs are not useful.   Too many, too scattered.  Not worth anything – not even a quick scan.

The list of ‘categories’, while impressive, doesn’t help unless you are glued to one category.   I could pick ‘Financial’, ‘Information Technology’, ‘Banking’ or ‘Insurance’ and still be in my job space.  So to use this feature, I would have to run them one at a time.  Not very efficient.

The bottom of the page says I can search on my competition.  Who needs that!  The boards are discouraging enough without thinking I might rank at the bottom of the listings.  ( I also wonder if this is a come on for some more ads for services.)

But, outside omnipresent ad space, there is a lot to dive into here.   I still need to run the three searches and then take a look at the goodies, like the advance search options and the additional tabs especially the one that reads “Advice and Resources”

Next time….the search on Career Builder.