Everybody seems to be going online to find their next job, we know that 78% of all job seekers are now found on line – why is this so? And where is the advice on how to maximize the use of the internet to find your next job?

Traditionally when people look for their next (or first) job they have either gone to their local papers, national papers or they have found a recruitment agency that has opportunities for them. New jobs never really came to them unless they were headhunted or happened to hear of an opportunity by word of mouth.

With the growth of major on line job boards such as Monster, Total Jobs, Recruitmentroom.co.uk and many others, people started to put their CV’s on line. Not only could local agencies or employers now find them but also they could search for jobs on the job advert boards. They can also set up automatic saved searches so that if an advert for a job came up that matched their profile, then that job advert would be emailed to them straight away.

The majority of recruitment agencies now use Job Boards to advertise their jobs and also to search the CV databases. The job boards are expensive to advertise on and the costs for access to the databases are also high, this restricts usage for the smaller specialist agencies as the investment per job board is quite high, therefore very few agencies subscribe to all of the boards and in fact many settle for usage with just one. It’s not just Agencies that use the job boards – Head-hunters, Recruitment Consultants and most importantly Direct Employers now use the job boards regularly. Just look at the adverts for the jobs on Monster for example, the whole range of jobs and salaries is incredible, pure fact that the only way really to get a new job is to go online. There is a small problem however.

The Job Boards are so busy trying to get you to put your CV on their databases and selling their services to their clients that they are forgetting the maths. If 78% all potential job seekers are putting their CV’s on to job boards and let’s say the leading job board in the UK have the best market share of 10% of that market, then they only have a total of 7.8% of the available job seekers in the market. This means that if you put your CV onto just that job board then you are putting yourself in with just 7.8% of new job seekers. Or putting it another way there are so many job boards targeting Agencies, Head-hunters, Recruitment Consultants and Direct Employers that it is just not financially viable for them to use ALL of the job boards, therefore if you are on just one site (the job boards want this) then are you really giving yourself the best possible advantage. If you are serious about your next career move then the best possible move you can make is to find out which Job Boards are best for you and make sure you appear on all of them. In other words make sure that you are seen by every potential employer!