collegeWith the New Year and my recent graduation from college, I was left wondering where to place my next step. To tell the truth, the whole thing kind of snuck up on me. I had graduated a semester early and hadn’t really done anything in terms of gaining experience that would lead me to my dream job. After winter vacation, I returned to my apartment in Tallahassee from my hometown, Orlando, and frantically began searching for employment opportunities that would replace my biannual financial aid.
At the suggestion of my parents, I went online and began searching the two main employment websites, Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com.
The first step was to post the most recent draft of my resume. Careerbuilder has a button which will allow you to upload your own document, rather than tediously entering the information yourself. I clicked here and was ordered to give my resume title. (Careerbuilder suggests to “use your desired Job Title or highlight your key experience and qualifications.”) I decided to go with “Experienced Editor/Writer”— in retrospect, a particularly dull title; but throughout the course of my job-hunting, I realized my lack of experience in the field of editing and limited myself to “Data Entry Receptionist with International Experience.” Next, I uploaded my resume, a MS Word file. Then, they asked me to select three job categories and provide my relative work experience, whether or not I had managed others (and how many), and my languages spoken. I also had to fix my work experience. It appeared they had extracted my past company information from my file, and poorly. After clicking “no” on their offers for information on Naval Reserve opportunities and degrees from an online university, I clicked “continue.” Then, I finally got to see my resume. It was butchered. They had reformatted my resume into plain-text very poorly, but I was given the opportunity to edit it myself. This was a pain in the ass. I had already taken the time to create my resume and make it look pretty; now I had to settle for boring, text-only format. Finally, I requested to only be contacted by email (I thought it was the lesser of the other two evils: phone and address), unchecked all the email-newsletter boxes, skipped their “special offer” from another online university, and clicked “post resume.” And it was done. Careerbuilder’s resume-posting regiment took about 30 minutes.
Monster was much easier. Again, I had to make up a resume title (I again went with Experienced Editor/Writer), choose public or private resume status (public, of course), work experience, and target job information. I uploaded the file and clicked “save resume.” I had to click through a pre-page ad offering information from an online university, which was a tedium I would later find to be a staple in Monster. Then, I was done. Easy. And my resume was presented in the beautiful format I created in MS Word! No lame text!
Next I searched both websites’ job listings. Both presented the listings in pretty much the same format. On both, I selected my location and clicked search. I had the opportunity to narrow the search to fields and interests, but after the hour it took to post my resume, I just wanted to see some jobs. When I clicked on a nice-sounding job, both sites either sent me directly to the company’s hiring website, or the job-information page hosted by Monster or Careerbuilder. Monster, although, continued to present me with pre-page ads that were continually annoying.
Between these two employment websites, Monster came out on top simply because my resume retained its original MS Word formatting. My tedious experience with reformatting Careerbuilder’s text-only resume left me screaming “Damn you, Careerbuilder.” Monster’s only annoyances are the superfluous pre-page ads that can be passed with a simple click of the “no, thank you” button. But the end result is where the true function of these websites stand out: the job hire. And I’m still waiting on my dream job.
