Executive Job Search Using Job Search Engines

Once you’ve got a dynamite executive resume together, the next step is to plan and start a comprehensive job search campaign. A truly effective campaign will utilize more than one resource and should include perusing relevant ads, visiting company pages of firms that interest you, browsing business journals for information and possible leads about companies in your industry or field of interest, leveraging your personal and business networks, surfing job boards, building relationships with recruiters, and using one or more of the job search engines that are readily available.

Job search engines, in contrast to dedicated job boards, use powerful search algorithms to glean listings from a few to hundreds of job boards, recruiter sites, and company pages and bring them all together for you in one place. They can make job search on the Web incredibly more efficient, so that you can spend more time on equally (or possibly more) important activities such as networking and cultivating your recruiter relationships.

Once you have selected a small group of 3-5 job search engines that best suit your needs, including most likely one or two of the really big, well known general search engines and a couple  of niche sites that focus on your industry or skill set, you’ll want to work on sharpening your “Boolean” search skills to narrow and make your results more meaningful and useful. Through careful selection of keywords and phrases coupled with specifics such as location, industry, salary level, etc., you can avoid wading through mountains of irrelevant listings.

Some things to watch out for are multiple listings of the same opportunity, or expired announcements, which commonly occur since these engines typically pull from a variety of sources. If you create a login on most of these sites, you are typically allowed to upload and store documents such as your executive resume, and in many cases to set up automatic notifications of listings that meet criteria you have set.

Among my long-time favorite sites are Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. There is also an engine called Linkup.com, which searches company sites for listings. Old standbys such as CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com that have been around seemingly forever can also produce some good leads. If you are willing to consider paid membership, sites such as ExecuNet.com, and BlueSteps.com are also excellent.

It is important to zero in on a handful of job search engines that you feel are most useful and stick to them, versus spinning your wheels visiting dozens of sites.