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SELF-EMPLOYMENT
Small Business Administration: www.sba.gov. Created by the federal government, this site offers extensive information on starting, financing, and managing your business.
Entrepreneur's Resource Center: edwardlowe.org. This site has a wealth of articles for businesses that are ready to move from the start-up to the growth phase.
FOR CREATING YOUR RESUME AND COVER LETTERS
Resumemaker.com: Here, you're hand-held in crafting your resume and cover letters from start to finish. Resumemaker.com offers dozens of resume styles, and for inspiration, hundreds of professionally created sample resumes and cover letters. Alas, like most resume/cover letter software and coaches, Resumemaker encourages you to use canned, bragging adjectives such as "self-starter" and "team-player." Those create distance between applicant and employer. Better to tell brief anecdotes of problems you faced, how you approached them, and the outcome (cost: $29.95 for students and entry-level workers, $39.95 for others).
JOB OPENINGS
Individual companies' websites: Once you've identified specific employers you'd like to work for, there's no substitute for checking those employers' sites every few days for new listings. Or at some large corporations' sites such as Microsoft's, sign up for their service which E-mails you every time it posts a job opening that matches your chosen keywords. Jobcentral.com aggregates job listings from 200 large corporations' websites.
Field-specific job sites: There are hundreds of sites devoted to jobs in a specific field. These are worth checking because relatively few job searchers scan those sites yet they're on-target for your career. Also, those sites usually contain career advice specific to that career. Top examples: auntminnie.com for radiologists, efinancialcareers.com for finance careers, biospace.com for the biotech industry, acs.org for chemists, astd.org for human resources professionals, talentzoo.com for advertising, marketing, and public relations, 6figurejobs.com, execunet.com and ritesite.com for senior executives. RiteSite requires a caveat. Unless you knew the man behind the site, John Lucht, you'd probably leave it before it even loaded—it takes forever. And once loaded, it reminds you more of a cheesy affiliate marketing site than a useful site for connecting top executives with elite retained recruiters. But for more than a decade, I've known and respected John Lucht, a top headhunter and author of the long-time bestseller: Rites of Passage at $100,000 to $1 million+. So, I looked past the too-slick site and concluded that senior executives should indeed check it out.
You can find links to hundreds of other field-specific job sites on the aforementioned portals: rileyguide.com and job-hunt.org.
The megasites: Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Hotjobs.com, and Craigslist.org.
Unless your resume is extraordinary, you probably won't find it worth spending much time searching the ads or posting your resume on these sites. That's because the odds are tiny that an employer will pick you from among the millions of job seekers who troll these sites. Mark Mehler, of careerxroads.com, a Chicago-based human resources consultancy, urges that if you decide to post your resume on these sites, to choose an option that allows you to decide who gets to see your resume. If you simply let it float out there, you're a candidate for identity theft. If you're employed and your boss gets a hold of it, you could be fired. And, unscrupulous headhunters could spam your resume to every employer on the planet and then demand a heavy commission if you're hired. (The headhunter finds out you've been hired by Googling you later.) That commission is enough to make most employers move on to another candidate.
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