Is It Worth Using Paid Job Boards or Can I Stick with The Free Ones?

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Are PAID job sites worth the investment or should we just stick to the various FREE sites (i.e.Indeed, Careerbuilder, etc.)?

 

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Are paid sites worth the money Indeed, Careerbuilder and the like?

As always, it depends.

One paid site I know of used to be a great site but has lost a lot of its luster. It has become an aggregator of jobs from other sites. Should you pay for that? No! You get that from indeed.

Indeed and SimplyHired aggregate jobs from many places. Same as GlassDoor.com. You don’t need to pay for most of the jobs.

So the simple answer was, “No. It isn’t worth paying for job board.”

However, it can be worth paying for LinkedIn.If your network is small or average sized and you want to be reaching out to people (as you should),Here’s what I think you should do.Join as many as 100 groups in your area of specialization (LinkedIn lets you join as many as 100 groups).

If you join 100 groups,  starting with the largest ones in your area of specialization, then,If you discover you not able to connect with enough people, if you network is still not large enough to provide you with entrée to the firms that you want to apply to or join, then become a paid member of LinkedIn.Start with the least expensive one and work your way up from there.

The most extensive service available through LinkedIn, I think, is $99 per month (I could be wrong.  It might be $119) And allows you 30 InMails during that month. If you’re not bumping up against inMail limitations, let me suggest a workaround for you.

You can get a lot of the data you want from Google Chrome extensions.  The chrome extensions include Prophet, Connect6 People Discovery, Connectifier Sociallinks, Discoverly for Gmail, Linkedin and more, EmailHunter, and Lusha.

What they do is when you visit a page where you have a 2nd level connection, 1 of these services will be good about providing you with a work email for them even if you’re not a connection with the person.

Here are a few more:

ContactOut

Intelligence Search

Klenty

LeadFinch

MakeLinx

Mon.ki

PeopleDiscovery

Download and install these connections for Chrome and you will get most of the contacts that you need with these extensions. If you’re still not successful getting email addresses for everyone that you want to connect with, then go to the paid service for LinkedIn.

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Do you really think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn 

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”