Vast majority of job openings posted online

At the risk of sounding obvious to those of you tech-savvy enough to be reading this blog, here's a post that's more for the newbies: New research says that job opportunities, at least for salaried employees, are far and away more likely to be posted on online job boards than anywhere else.

In a survey of 1,000 human resources professionals by the Inavero Institute for Service Research, those polled said that a full 72 percent of job openings were posted online.

Why? Easy: Lower prices for listing jobs (often free), more responses, and better quality responses.

In tech-heavy areas like San Francisco, one site—Craigslist—dominates job listings almost completely. Craigslist has such a lock on job listings here that there's really no point in even bothering with any other site to look for a job (unless you're targeting a specific company). I still have old profiles at HotJobs, Monster, and other sites, but I can't remember the last time I've even bothered to update my resume at them. Craigslist's sequentially-ordered and well-categorized job posts, however, make it easy for job hunters to check on the latest listings with a single click. (As a hiring manager, I know how well a single Craigslist ad can work, too. I can't recall ever getting fewer than 30 resumes from a single entry-level job post; stories abound of recruiters seeing 500 resumes and up.)

The linked blog post at bytes.com outlines some intelligent job-hunting tactics for those still tiptoeing away from the Sunday classifieds: Use the web to understand the pay range for the job you're looking for, check specific companies' internal "employment" web pages to find jobs that may not be posted on commercial services, and use both general job hunting sites as well as niche sites (like Dice.com) in your search.

I'd add one thing missed by the story to that list: Don't forget social networks like Facebook and especially LinkedIn to meet people in the company or industry where you'd like to work, and let everyone know through those services that you're in the market for a job. (Those 28 percent of jobs that aren't posted online are probably filled through word of mouth... and that mouth may belong to someone you know!)

LINK: The Best Career Opportunities are Online