Many folks today are touting the Internet as a way to find jobs online. And to be honest, for those in certain career categories (especially high-tech) online certainly is one worthwhile way to go. But is online job hunting the be-all and end-all as it is often portrayed?

If you listen to online job hunting boosters, online is the way to go. A sure-fire way to find a job. When you start thinking about how a job site on the Web could be constructed you have visions of one central site offering access to millions of job postings listed by employer, arranged by geographical area and searchable by a variety of criteria or key words.

More often than not, online job listings are not gathered together on one site, but spread out over hundreds if not thousands of sites. It can be pretty overwhelming. You have to focus your job-seeking efforts on sites that seem to offer you the best chance of scoring a job offer, but how can you tell which sites are more likely to pay off for you?

There is no easy answer. A site that paid off for a friend or coworker might not yield even a single job offer for you. Your best bet is to look around and to ask questions about which sites have worked and which haven't from fellow job seekers. You might also see which sites make it onto listings recommended by legitimate job counselors.

According to Bolles, only a fraction of the 16 million employers in the U.S. job market are on the Web. Even the famous sites-such as HeadHunter.Net, Monster Board, Career Mosaic, Career Path, America's Job Bank, Career Builder and Online Career Center-each give you access to only .06 percent of all U.S. employers and 6 percent of all vacancies.

It gets worse. Bolles says that only a fraction of the 20,000 existing job titles are on the Web. He estimates that about 75 percent of online job listings are only for job titles in the computer, engineering, electronic, technological, health care, financial and academic fields. Few vacancies in the rest of the 20,000 job titles are listed on the Web.

So you've looked around, considered the warnings and now are ready to pursue that new job via the Web-what steps should you take?

The first step is figuring out just what it is you are looking for in a new job. Determine what your strengths and weakness are by taking advantage of online job counseling services like JobSmart (http://jobsmart.org/tools/career/index.htm) and then narrow down the job listing site candidates to the ones you think are best suited to the career areas that concern you.

Polish your résumé. You need to learn how to adjust your résumé for the best presentation online. You also should learn the best keyword search strategies for when you publish your résumé with an online listing service.

Seek out an online listing site or two-or three. The hardest part of looking for a job online is knowing where to start. One place to begin at might be JobWeb (www.jobWeb.org), which offers a list of links to nearly a hundred other job sites, broken down by region.

Here are a few other sites:

This site enables you to simultaneously search some or all of the current daily classified ads from almost 60 U.S. newspapers--including most of the major ones. (The Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times are included; the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are not). The number of postings typically is more than 230,000.

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