Online jobbing

Yesterday was a really rubbish day in the office.  I got some stuff done, and then I got lumbered with some more stuff that no-one else wanted to do. Actually it may not be that they didn't want to do it, it may just be that they've all cleared off on holiday and left me to steer the ship into the nearest asteroid field. But like I always say in these difficult and demanding times....   Whatever.



Dilbert.com


Of course I don't actually hate my co-workers, and I don't entirely hate my job, but I'm at a point now where they've piled so much stuff on my shoulders that I've completely stopped worrying about any of it. I couldn't care less. As a team we're getting little or no support, constantly having the rules and regulations concerning what we do changed, and are basically unappreciated at every level. Sadly that leads to the same conclusion every time I analyse it.  Why am I bothering?

So on that note.... job hunting. It may not be the best time to be looking for another job given the current financial circumstances that we find the country in, but there's nothing wrong with reading the menu. It's only when you start ordering food that things can get complicated.  Especially if you go for the really expensive wine to help wash it down.

So what is there??...  Well, I've sample the first 5 job sites from Google. They are: Jobsite.co.uk, Totaljobs.co.uk, Monster.co.uk, Jobsearch.co.uk and fish4.co.uk/jobs.  Here's the quick and dirty results for a job in Information Technology within about 10 miles of where I live:

1000's of UK Jobs
74 Jobs
Leading UK Jobsite
456 Jobs
Build a better career, Find your calling
81 Jobs
UK Jobs from the best companies
56 Jobs
UK Jobs and London Jobs
127 Jobs

So that's an interesting set of results for a start....  All over the place. Leads me to think that the search criteria are somewhat spurious and/or the jobs in their databases are possibly non-existent in some cases.
So I'll delve a little deeper and see what I can discover.

Let's start with the salary filter.
  • Jobsite allows sort by Salary High to Low 
    • (The highest being £200k p.a. in Banking Sales - hardly I.T.)
  • TotalJobs allows sort by Salary High to Low 
    • (The highest being £18k per hour - a typo, clearly)
  • Monster has no Salary filter at all.
  • Jobsearch allows sort by Salary High to Low 
    • (The highest being £100k p.a. for Business development manager)
  • Fish4 lists the highest Salary as £45k
This leaves me with no faith in totaljobs.com at all. They appear to load up with any old jobs and not review the content of the database. So the chances of finding a decent match are going to be difficult to say the least.

Fish4 also get scrubbed at this point. If the best they have is 45k, then I'm not sure they'll have anything of any real interest especially as thats from an alleged sample of 127 jobs.

More filtering then....  Let's try Full Time and Permanent roles and sort by location, nearest first. Top two roles from each site:

Jobsite
Senior IT Audit Manager (£60k to £800k clearly another typo) or a Lead Consultant / Junior Project manager in Aylesbury (£450k to £500k more typos or very well paid work)

Monster
An HR Adminstrator (no salary) in the Army, or a Business Intelligence Developer in data warehousing (£40k & benfits).

Jobsearch
Software Development Manager, Windows, SQL & C++ (£50k to £60k)

Well, Jobsearch looks like it's the one most likely to come up with something that might fit.  It certainly appears to be the most professionally run and it does actually have salary filtering in the advanced search section of the site.  If you're looking for a job, and you're only using online tools to do it with, that's my recommendation. But, and this I think is the most important thing I can tell you.  Make sure you've spoken to your contacts first.  There's every chance that someone you know might be looking for a person just like you.  Places like LinkedIn are full of such opportunities.  Don't be afraid to ask.

For now, I have to go back to working for the man. 

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