A job bank or employment website can hold many advantages for the job seeker. It may list job requirements, starting salary, and area in which the job is likely to take place. Many job banks organize their information by field, profession and area, which can help people easily eliminate those fields in which they don’t want to search or those geographical areas where they wouldn’t consider employment.
One thing that may be overwhelming for people using a job bank is the sheer number of them. There are those directed toward a specific field like information technology or engineering, and then those that simply have huge amounts of job listings, such as groups like craigslist and monster.com. Job banks aren’t always conducted on a for-profit basis, and people may be able to search for certain kinds of work through employment agencies run by state or country governments too.
As mentioned, advantages of these banks can include number of jobs available to search. Many also offer tips on things like crafting successful resumes, writing letters of inquiry and being skilled during interviews. A few sites will catalog resumes so that they can easily sent as part of an application, though these should have no social security number or other country identifying number listed on them.
Some sites have job etiquette recommendations too, such as when to write thank you notes for interviews, or when it’s fair to call a potential employer after an interview has occurred. These resources can be useful. Yet most are also obtainable in good books on finding employment.
Even though most job banks offer reputable work for job seekers, and this is one of the most common methods of finding work, there are inherent pitfalls with certain job bank websites. Most people can soon educate themselves on how to avoid job bank fraud. These are the following things to avoid when using an employment website:
- Paying for job listings
- Giving out Social Security number or other identifying information (like information on physical characteristics)
- Giving access to bank accounts
- Providing work with no defined payment method (especially common in freelance fields)
- Applying for jobs, especially those that require a large amount of information and sound too good to be true.
Career specialists recommend that people use job bank types that have good reputations, but reputations can be mixed. For example, there are numerous legitimate jobs on sites like craigslist, but also offers that run scams, usually simply to gather email addresses for the purpose of sending spam email. If a person encounters a likely scam, it’s a good idea to report this to the job bank company, since this is a great way of getting rid of those posters who uses these banks for illegal or fraudulent purposes.
