Helping job seekers
Posted by: Barbara Bibel
Public libraries are full of people looking for work. Many of them have few or no computer skills and there are too few of us to sit down and spend lots of time helping. www.indeed.com is a website that is easy to use. It provides access to over a million open positions culled from newspapers, company websites, job search sites, and associations. The home page has two boxes labeled “what” and “where’ for users to enter job titles, keywords, or company names along with a city, state, or zip code. The site then searches for appropriate listings witin 25 miles. Users may adjust the parmeters using a dropdown menu. Each listing provides the job titles, description, company name, exat location, qualifications, salary, source of the listing, and the date posted. Users may apply for the jobs directly using embedded links. The left margin offers search modifications such as salary, comapny,etc. and the right margin has sponsored links to schools and vocational information. A search for cpomuter technician postions in Oakland, CA retreived 744 listing, most of which were appropriate. Users may create e-mail alerts for notifications of new postings for desired jobs. They can also create an account to save their searches. The advanced search allows for more precision with Boolean operators and the browse option allows searching by state or by job classification. There are also links to online tools for Firefox, Google toolbar, and mobile devices. This is a free site, so budget-strapped libraries can offer it and those with limited computer skills will find it easy to navigate.
