CheckMate

If you’ve ever thought the career website you were on wasn’t so hot, a new report from Forrester Research called “Best and Worst of Career Web Sites” that was just written about in Network World won’t surprise you.

Forrester evaluated 12 very well known career websites for job seeker usability - the four largest financial services firms, the four largest retail firms, and the top four job boards. All of them failed the evaluation.

Now, my point in talking about this isn’t to slam these sites, particularly the financial services ones since there are some outstanding firms on that list. In fact, just the opposite - I don’t want someone to miss out on a great financial advisor career with a top firm because they got frustrated with the career section of their site, or had problems with a listing over on one of the major job boards.

So, with that in mind, what can you do to make your job search efforts more effective? Here are three suggestions:

• It’s been said many times, but don’t depend solely or even mainly on the major job boards (specifically Careerbuilder and Monster) for career guidance or your job search. For example, while we do have listings online, you won’t find them on any of the boards Forrester evaluated, since we very intentionally ceased posting there some time ago (and, while things can always change, we don’t envision going back at this point).

• Tough as it may be, don’t judge the company by what you see on the career section of their site. As I said, there are some outstanding financial services companies whose career pages and online application processes could be better.

• Last, and by far most important, get help - enlist the services of a knowledgeable, competent, external recruiter to steer you through the process.

I can’t emphasize that last point enough, and before you dismiss it as just another blatant sales pitch, hear me out.

We spend a major portion of our time helping candidates navigate through the search and hiring process. These are sharp, independent, take-charge, self-starters - if they weren’t, they wouldn’t even be candidates - whose first inclination is to do everything on their own. And many times they’ve still had trouble finding the position they want, or getting in front of the hiring manager, or making their way through the online application, or with any number of other variables in the process.

We know the positions, we know the hiring managers, we know the process, and we know the frustrations, and that’s a big reason why we continually harp on the idea that we won’t let you go through this process alone.

Of course, we’d like to have you use us, but whoever you use, make sure they can say that about themselves and will do those things for you.

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