Putting the Net to Work
Can search agents make sense of job-hunt databases?
Hunting for a job late last year, lawyer Gant Redmon stumbled across CareerBuilder, a job database on the Internet. Redmon searched the database with no success but was intrigued by the site's "personal search agent." It's an interactive feature that lets visitors key in job criteria such as location, title, and salary, then E-mails them when a matching position is posted in the database. Redmon chose the keywords legal, intellectual property, and Washington, D.C. Three weeks later, he got his first notification of an opening. "I struck gold," says Redmon, who E-mailed his resume to the employer and won a position as in-house counsel for Axent Technologies in Rockville, Md. "It was the first hit I got," he says.
With thousands of career-related sites on the Internet, finding promising openings can be time consuming and inefficient. Search agents like CareerBuilder's reduce the need for repeated visits to the databases. But although a search agent worked for Redmon, career experts see drawbacks. Narrowing your criteria, for example, may work against you: "Every time you answer a question you eliminate a possibility," says Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the 1998 edition of What Color Is Your Parachute? (Ten Speed Press, $16.95 paperback).
For any job search, you should start with a narrow concept--what you think you want to do--then broaden it. "None of these programs do that," says Bolles. "There is no career counseling implicit in all of this." Instead, the best strategy is to use the agent as a kind of tip service to keep abreast of jobs in a particular database; when you get E-mail, consider it a reminder to check the database again. "I would not rely on [agents] for [finding] everything that is added to a database that might interest me," says Margaret Riley Dikel, author of the Riley Guide, a comprehensive job-search guide available only on the Net [http://www.dbm.com/jobguide].
Come on back! Some sites design their agents to entice job hunters to return. When CareerSite's agent sends out messages to those who have signed up for its service, for example, it includes only three potential jobs--those it considers the best matches. There may be more matches in the database; job hunters will have to visit the site again to find them--and they do. "On the day after we send out our messages, we see a big spike in our traffic," says Seth Peets, vice president of marketing for CareerSite.
Plugged-in job hunters can also tap professional associations for a similar service. The Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, Va., for example, sends out weekly E-mails about openings across the country. Webgrrls International has 107 chapters, most of which have electronic mailing lists where members post job leads.
Even those who aren't hunting for jobs may find search agents worthwhile. Some use them to keep tabs on the demand for their line of work or gather fodder on compensation to arm themselves when negotiating for a raise. Although happily employed, Redmon maintains his agent at CareerBuilder. "You always keep your eyes open," he says. Working with a personal search agent means having another set of eyes looking out for you.
YOUR PERSONAL HEADHUNTER In quest of the perfect job? Here are seven Web sites with personal search agents.
CareerBuilder [http://www.careerbuilder.com] Jobs: 3,000-5,000. Employers: 200, including Sallie Mae, Southwestern Bell, Taco Bell CareerMart [http://www.careermart.com] Jobs: 5,000. Employers: 500, including IBM, Philips, Burger King CareerSite [http://www.careersite.com] Jobs: 5,000-7,000. Employers: 400, including AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, CIGNA Insurance, Ford E.Span [http://www.espan.com] Jobs: 15,000. Employers: 1,000, including Caterpillar, Compaq, IBM, Lotus, MCI, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Westinghouse IntelliMatch [http://www.intellimatch.com] Jobs: 2,500. Employers: 300, including AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, National Semiconductor Monster Board [http://www.monsterboard.com] Jobs: 25,000. Employers: 4,000, including CVS, Compaq, IBM, Intel, McDonald's, Price Waterhouse 4Work.com [http://www.4work.com] Jobs: 6,000. Employers: 1,735, including Blockbuster, Norell, United Way
This story appears in the October 27, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.