Looking for a Job...Online

"Looking for a Summer Job...Online", April 14 2009

It is nearly mid-April at this point, and I am sure that some of you (only some of you would procrastinate this much right?) may still be looking for a job for the summer months. Maybe you applied for a few jobs and you weren't successful; maybe you had plans for post-graduate studies that fell through; or perhaps you have procrastinated and haven't started looking yet (ha ha). No matter what the case, there are lots of ways you can find yourself something by the end of May.

Gone is the era where you find jobs exclusively in the newspaper, through word-of-mouth, or connections with other people. Now, a student has to be resourceful to find a good-paying job. There has been plenty of mention of OSCAR and the MSU Jobs websites in the past, and it can be assumed that you've already utilized these resources. Now what?

There are websites that many people looking for jobs seek out: Monster, Workopolis and JobZilla to name a few. You sign up, upload a resume and start hunting. You can either apply for jobs using their portal, or potential employers can hunt you down. You can use these sites to search by region, job, length of employment etc.

I stumbled on TalentEgg, a Canadian jobsearch site made specifically for new graduates and students rather by accident about a week and a half ago. The site just celebrated it's first anniversary, and looks to be picking up quite a bit. There are a lot of big-name employers who currently use the website, such as Molson, the Trinity Health Center, Yellowpages, BMO etc. You can find internships, part-time work, seasonal jobs as well as "grown-up" work. There are also two current McMaster students working on their Career Incubator online magazine, and my old Res Rep (Hondo) is involved too. Check it out!

Another good possibility is Craigslist, which functions like the Classifieds section in a newspaper. However, with Craigslist you need to look out for sketchy-sounding jobs, like this one. The more information the ad has about the company you would be working for, generally the more legitimate it would be.

I recently came upon LinkedIn after getting a referral from a friend. It is a networking site similar to Facebook, except there is a job search function. The connections you have allow to be "Reconmended", where the people on your contact list talk about your skills and work ethic, etc. If you are reconmended by people, it shows up on your profile and potential employers can read them; kind of like a reference works.

Lastly, if you want to get involved in the non-Profit sector, you should check out Charity Village. They have a lot of job advertisements available for a lot of different charitable groups and Non Governmental Organizations. They also have a large number of volunteer listings if you would like to consider doing that during the academic year or the summer.

I highly recommend you check out the aforementioned websites, because there are a lot of jobs out there for students this summer. Good luck!