Any experiences with the big three online job sites?

Question

My company is preparing to post some job postings for a programmer (or two) and am curious as to what experiences any of you have had with the big three job posting providers (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs). Are there others out there that we don't know about that might be better? Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Dice.com is good and is specifically for technical jobs.

Answer 2

Craigslist is also one of the most cost effective job listing sites. For some cities the cost is entirely free, in other cities the cost wouldn't even be enough to pay for a week (or perhaps a day) on many for pay job posting sites.

Answer 3

You might not get as many applicants, but you will likely get more qualified ones on job boards like careers.stackoverflow.com or jobs.joelonsoftware.com.

The cool thing about Joel's job board is that they issue a full refund if you don't find anybody through them, in fact you can get a refund for any reason whatsoever within 90 days of posting the job. I can vouch for the refund part.

For more senior level positions I also am a big fan of LinkedIn.

Answer 4

If you just need some warm bodies, those sites will suffice. I also like Craigslist a lot, too.

Note that while you'll probably get some responses from the sites you listed, you usually don't get excellent people from those places. Excellent people are already happy where they are, because they have enough clout to work wherever they want. They're also more likely to be contractors, because they get the freedom to self-direct their own output.

In general, the only tried-and-true way to get excellent people is to:

• offer an interesting project that allows large amounts of autonomy
• provide a nurturing work environment where Stuff Gets Done because people want to do a great job and grow the business, not because a clock is ticking
• have a useful professional network (LinkedIn, local tech user group meetings, etc.)

There is a longer road, which involves hiring good people and then making them excellent. But this is much harder, and requires a corporate culture that encourages excellence, and is outside the scope of this question.

Answer 5

It really depends on the level of folks you are trying to hire.

I think the big three are pretty much crap for development jobs. As proof, open your local newspaper on the weekend, Monster publishes their job section! Maybe it's bias, but back when I was on the market I don't remember ever seeing anything decent on any of these sites unless it was advertised in tons.

I think that your best bets are: 1) Go with sites that (hopefully) decent developers read. Most folks never heard of the stackoverflow job board, but you want the ones that do. I'm sure the new career site might be useful as well. ArsTechnica is probably good as well though it seems too startup-oriented to me. 2) Go with sites that are IT specific. Dice is fairly decent, IMHO, though messy. 3) Consider CraigsList if you're in a decent market. I've found the quality of jobs advertised to be fairly decent, except that many of the positions are advertised by recruiter - citing that you are the principal is useful. 4) Networking still works, so employee references and incentives could be more const-effective.

Remember that smart job seekers use Indeed to cross-search multiple sites.