Newsgroups are online, message-based communities of people with common interests. Each newsgroup is dedicated to a topic, and you may write, search, read and reply to messages about that topic. Several newsgroups are job and career related.
Some groups are dedicated to employment advertising, while others are dedicated to resume submissions, job wanted messages, or general discussions about employment and careers. The Usenet Employment Newsgroups are a very productive source of job posting. Thousands of jobs are posted to the various Newsgroups each day and these opportunities are often overlooked by most online job seekers. Many Employers, Recruiters, and Job Sites automatically post their positions to the Newsgroups, and the groups serve as a Meta Job Search Engine. Unfortunately, since these are all free postings and anyone can post to newsgroups the groups are filled with off topic posts, scams, and other worthless junk.
Tips for Your Job Search
Most online job seekers do not use the employment newsgroups. Most job seekers concentrate their efforts on the large commercial job sites and the employment newsgroups require some time and effort to investigate and use efficiently. Use a Newsgroup Directory to determine if any of the employment groups could be useful in your job search. Look for employment newsgroups serving your industry, occupation or locations of interest.
If you decide to incorporate one or more of the newsgroups into your job search, you will want to use a program specifically designed for newsgroups. Web site interfaces, such as Google or the newsgroup function in Outlook Express are not the best methods to access this material. One of the best Newsreader available is Agent. It is available free of charge or can be upgraded for a small fee. The program comes with complete installation instructions and it includes excellent filtering tools. Once you configure the software, the process of retrieving and reading the messages of interest is more or less automatic.
Author: JobMetaSeek Staff
Author Bio:
This article was written by the staff of JobMetaSeek, a career and job search service for managers, professionals and executives in the United States and Canada.
