CheckMate

Because you can know exactly what you’re looking for and still not be able to find it.

Robert Wilson had a great post on his Job Search Engine Guide blog yesterday called “Are Job Boards in Denial?” in which he performed a very representative simple search for insurance sales jobs and analyzed the results.

It’s well worth going through the entire post with all the supporting data, but, in short, for this simple search much like ones many of us have done thousands of times…

‘insurance sales’ jobs;
within ‘x’ miles of city ‘y’;
posted within 7 days; and,
sorted by relevance.

…he got back 156 jobs - a nice, reasonable size group to work with. On closer analysis, though, only 11 were actually insurance sales agent positions, and they were scattered throughout the larger list in no particular order.

While Robert’s talking about a specific (and unnamed) job board search engine and how it handles searches, my experience has been that what he saw could have happened with any search engine. The expertise of the person doing the search is a big factor, too, but I have a guy who is a master at that stuff, and he’ll tell you there are still many times when he gets bogus results.

Naturally, we post jobs online and do our best to make them findable - it’s a tremendous resource and, of course, we’ll continue to use it. And I’d be the last guy in the world to tell you to give up online searching, but, as great as it can be, it’s still the proverbial crapshoot.

So, keep looking, but also work all the other avenues out there, including recruiters who can connect you directly to the places you want to go.

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