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Navigating New Job Hunting Rules
For many Americans looking for work, the first stop is an online job board. Now job seekers are finding that prospective employers increasingly are looking elsewhere to find new hires—the companies’ own Web sites.

By JOSEPH DE AVILA
For many Americans looking for work, the first stop is an online job board. Now job seekers are finding that prospective employers increasingly are looking elsewhere to find new hires—the companies’ own Web sites.

To draw more applicants to their sites, companies such as software makers Intuit Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. are revamping their online career pages, including making them more interactive by adding videos and employee profiles. Companies also are trying to reach job seekers through social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Sodexo Inc., which provides food services to institutions, offers online “widgets” at its Web site, which send alerts to job hunters’ computer screens when the company has new openings.

Companies say they are scaling back advertising on online job boards, which saves them money. By focusing more on their own career pages, companies also reduce the number of applications they need to sift through. And, they say, people applying through a prospective employer’s own Web site are on average better-qualified than applicants coming through job boards.

New Approaches
As companies increasingly seek new hires through their own Web sites, job hunters should consider new strategies.

Broaden job searches by using multiple tools.
Research companies that meet your requirements for a desirable employer.
Make use of social-media sites to network with existing employees.
Apply directly to a company’s Web site, not through an online job board.

Now Hiring: Contract Workers?
May data show employers are hanging on to contract workers since they remain wary of bringing on full-timers By Prashant Gopal

The good news for unemployed Americans is that companies seem poised to begin hiring. The bad news is that these are likely to be temporary jobs, often without health care and other benefits.

In a recession, contract workers are often the first to go. But often, they’re the first to be hired back, because in an uncertain environment, employers want to be flexible.

“I think it’s coming,” said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “We might be at the trough of the recession, and we might be heading into a time of large-scale hiring of contract workers.”

Since November, employers—reacting to the economic meltdown—have been shedding temporary workers at an alarming pace. The number of U.S. temporary help services workers dropped by 90,000 in November (on a seasonally adjusted basis) and fell by more than 70,000 every month until March, when the reductions suddenly began to slow, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In April, 55,000 temp workers were cut. But in May, the number of temp workers fell by only 6,500.

The Cuts Were Too Deep
“In the last few weeks we’re seeing some stabilization,” said Bill DeMario, chief operating officer for Ajilon Professional Staffing, a recruitment firm in Melville, N.Y. “Companies are looking to bring in temporary workers for workloads where they had cut too deeply.”

Only the Employed Need Apply
By DANA MATTIOLI
With unemployment at 9.4% and rising, it’s a buyer’s market for employers that are hiring. But many employers are bypassing the jobless to target those still working, reasoning that these survivors are the top performers.

“If they’re employed in today’s economy, they have to be first string,” says Ryan Ross, a partner with Kaye/Bassman International Corp., an executive recruiting firm in Dallas. Mr. Ross says more clients recently have indicated that they would prefer to fill positions with “passive candidates” who are working elsewhere and not actively seeking a job.

The bias extends from front-line workers to senior managers. Charlie Wilgus, managing partner of executive search for Lucas Group, based in Atlanta, says a manufacturing client looking for a division president recently refused to consider a former divisional president at Newell Rubbermaid Inc. whose department had been eliminated. The client doesn’t want candidates who have been laid off, Mr. Wilgus says

Your Digital Profile

Paper résumés are passé. According to a June 17 NPR segment, recruiters increasingly are looking for evidence that prospective hires are comfortable living in a digital world. LinkedIn profiles are a must, blogs a plus. But beware of what your e-mail address says about you. No cutesy, joint husband-and-wife e-mail addresses, please. Also, at least one executive looks down on AOL (TWX) addresses: “AOL was so 1998,” he says.

To listen to the segment, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/recession-job-search/reference/

Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble
Online job-search and headhunting is changing rapidly, and frontrunner Monster is losing ground to LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and even Twitter

SHRINKING SHARE
For Monster, a publicly traded online job site with $1 billion in sales and 80 million résumés on file, the growing appeal of LinkedIn to recruiters is just one more headache to contend with. Other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are also becoming popular destinations for employers. And niche sites such as TheLadders and BlueSteps, both of which target high earners, are gaining followers among recruiters and job seekers alike. While traffic to Monster is up because of the growing ranks of the newly unemployed, its share of job listings among the big three has declined from nearly 40% in December 2007 to 34% in May of this year, according to job market research and analysis firm Wanted Technologies. And the site saw a 31% drop in revenue last quarter. (Monster gets 90% of its revenues from fees it charges recruiters to post jobs and search its résumé database; the rest comes from advertising.) “The big job boards have peaked,” says Gerry Crispin of consultancy CareerXroads.

Iannuzzi’s next step is to address the one-size-fits-all nature of Monster’s site, which gets about 12 million unique visitors a month. It’s rolling out “contextual search” technology that distinguishes between, say, someone who went to Harvard and someone who lives on Harvard Avenue. Iannuzzi calls the technology “game-changing,” but rivals beg to differ. “It’s an attempt to catch up,” says Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, which saw its North American revenue drop 27% in the first quarter.

SOUPED-UP SEARCH
Perhaps the biggest threat comes from LinkedIn, a six-year-old social networking site with a distinctly professional bent. In January the privately held Mountain View (Calif.) company consolidated the various tools it had been selling to corporate hiring departments into a suite of services called Talent Advantage, which now boasts more than 1,000 customers, double the number it had last year. For $7,000 per user at a client company, hiring managers get a customized Web site, or “dashboard,” and souped-up search capability so they can reach out to qualified candidates, individually or in groups. (Recruiters can also buy job postings.) The network even “pushes” candidates to employers who meet preset criteria. While some LinkedIn members may not want to hear from a recruiter, they’ll often send the message along to someone else in their network. “Finding passive candidates—that’s our sweet spot,” says David Hahn, LinkedIn’s director of product management. Recruiters agree. “We could not believe the candidates we got” from LinkedIn, says Scott Morrison, director of global recruiting programs at software giant salesforce.com (CRM). “This is a gold mine for us.”

Twitter is also gaining traction in the realm of job search.

Find a Job

By Alison Doyle, About.com Guide to Job Searching

Find job listings – fast. Here’s information on where to find job listings, including the best job sites, jobs listed by location and type of job, how to job search and apply online, confidential job searching, building your career, and leaving or losing your job.

1. Find Job Listings
2. Online Job Search
3. Job / Career Options
4. Networking / Career Building
5. Job Applications
6. Job Fairs
7. How to Follow Up

1. Job Search Help
2. Job Search Tips and Tools
3. College Job Search
4. Teen Jobs
5. Work Abroad
6. Work From Home Jobs
7. Resignation / Losing Your Job

Why Business Plans Don’t Deliver
Successful business plans that impress investors are seldom written on the back of a napkin. They include a logical statement of a problem and its solution, hard evidence and straight talk about the risks and challenges involved. Here’s how to write a business plan that won’t end up in the trash.

Top 100 Job Site Niches – 2009

The 2009 Top 100 US Job Site Niches report lists the 100 most searched for job categories. For each of these employment categories it lists the top ranked job boards according to Google but excludes the following:

* general-purpose job boards like monster.com
* subdomain spam from general-purpose job board sites like science.jobs.com (currently dominating the search results)
* sites exclusively powered by job search engines
* sites that are part of a large network of domains
* search engine spam made for AdSense (MFA)
* job sites that require job seekers to register or pay
* job guides and career book sites (many look deceptively like job boards)
* almost defunct boards and sites with only a handful of jobs
* job sites that don’t publish dates on the job postings

Do You Have the Entrepreneurial Gene? By Eve Tahmincioglu

We hear it often: “That guy (or gal) is a born entrepreneur.”

Having interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs in my career, I’d have to say that statement accurately reflects a common characteristic shared by many successful businesspeople. Call it the entrepreneurial gene.

Take Richard Tait, co-founder of the company that produced the popular line of Cranium board games. Growing up in Scotland, Tait didn’t just take on a paper route. He also sold bacon sandwiches from a cart with the Sunday newspapers he delivered — and ended up making a killing.

And the founder of Quicken Loans, Dan Gilbert, started a pizza business out of his mother’s kitchen when he was 12.

But while it helps to be born a fearless entrepreneur, it’s not a requirement. So take heart.

Unemployed Hit the Road to Find Jobs
With the unemployment rate at 9.4%, some Americans are willing to go wherever they can to nab a job, even if it is temporary. To adapt, they find living quarters near the job in campers or cheap apartments, giving up normal family life for a paycheck, in a contemporary echo of the itinerants who roamed the country for work in the Great Depression.

Evidence of this labor trend is mostly anecdotal. In Linden, Tenn., where more than 300 people lost their jobs when an auto-parts plant closed in September, at least 20 now work three hours away in Paducah, Ky., manning tugboats on the Tennessee River, says John Carroll, the mayor of Perry County, Tenn. While there, they sleep on the tugboats. The unemployment rate in their home county is 22%.

In Detroit, where layoffs have hit about half of the 5,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 58, a union official says he has a list of 2,200 members who are willing to travel for work, up from 1,400 last year. “We have guys all over the country: California, Chattanooga, West Virginia, Las Vegas,” says Bob Hines, the local’s assistant business manager.

A provider of corporate temporary housing, Oakwood Worldwide, has seen a 6% rise this year in rentals of furnished apartments, which it attributes to more people taking temporary jobs away from home.

And ITT Corp. says it relocated more new hires in 2008 than ever before — 13%, versus a typical 3%. Many employees are moving just themselves, keeping their families and their homes in a different state, says ITT’s director of human resources, Lisa Simeon.

U.S. Census surveys of mobility actually don’t report more people moving, but fewer. The surveys, however, ask respondents whether they are living somewhere other than where they did a year before. They don’t measure workers who are currently away from home but don’t consider themselves to have moved.

‘Partial Mobility’
“There is this partial-mobility strategy” now, says demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution, in which people are starting to move in a makeshift and impermanent fashion. He likens it to the way many Mexican workers come to the U.S. and leave their families behind.