Ask the Recruiter

As someone who has posted his resume to just about every job board out there, I want your opinion.

Do prospective employers actually hunt for candidates on these Web sites? As a recruiter, if you found a great candidate, would you cold call or e-mail him/her like we prospective employees cold call you?

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Do you know of any situation where someone actually landed a job just by posting his/her resume online and hoping a newspaper would contact him/her?

Just wondering.

Thanks,

Job Hunter

Oh, yes, I call. You bet. And I am not the only one.

When I asked Poynter Career Center Director Colleen Eddy, she e-mailed me with this:

"Yes, some employers do search the resume database and call candidates. I know for a fact that they search Poynter Career Center's resume database. You can see this in the testimonials on the site."

Here are two examples:

"We've been able to identify some strong candidates after both posting our openings and searching the posted resumes on Poynter's Career Center site. In one instance, a call to someone who'd placed her resume on the site led us to a great referral."

-- Sheila Solomon, Senior Editor for Recruitment, Chicago Tribune

"I've had two applications so far within the first day of posting and I reached out to two more candidates I found in the resume database. Lots of views, most likely because of the upsell into the highlighted job."

-- Christine Montgomery, Director of Electronic Publishing, St. Petersburg Times

Joe Grimm

I am more likely to search for resumes and call people on hard-to-fill specialties. But I know that the people who write directly to us want to work for us, while many of the people on a job board might not be interested in our location at all.

Colleen Eddy also will work with job seekers to prepare their packages and present them to employers. You can give her a call or e-mail her at ceddy@poynter.org.

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Coming Friday: He'd love to be overseas but wonders if he has the drive and discipline to make it work as a foreign correspondent.

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