Web Week

Job-hunting season

What do we do on our holidays? Leave work behind us and wish never to have to return. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, many of us take that sentiment further, using the summer break as an opportunity to look for a new job. Once the holidays are over, Mondays and Tuesdays are particularly busy times for people seeking fresher pastures. Seek is the country's most-visited site for job-hunters, accounting for about two-thirds of all online job browsing tracked by Nielsen this month. And there would seem to be a fair number of jobs to go round - 9402 were listed on the site yesterday.


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Picking and choosing

Netcheck, a five-year-old site owned by The Radio Network (in turn part-owned by Herald publisher APN), ranks second in job-site popularity. Jobs, which over the summer shut-down are less numerous than normal, are classified in three sections: general, IT and executive positions. You don't have to be registered to use Netcheck but if you are, you can have it send email notification of jobs of interest, save job ads in a folder for future reference and store resumes and templates for cover letters.


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Company profiles

Almost neck-and-neck with Netcheck in popularity is Jobstuff, a site run by publisher Fairfax. In common with the other sites, Jobstuff has a company profiles section, but this tends to be far from comprehensive. Jobstuff at least contains an entry for Fairfax, but none for APN. But then, Netcheck mentions neither, indicating the limited usefulness of this site feature.


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From there to here

This site is more outward-looking than the others. As the name implies, it wants to be useful to browsers whose dream of fresher pastures involves transplanting from overseas to here. It will not only help them find work, but has links to services they will need to make the move.