LOCATING AND COMPLETING ONLINE JOB APPLICATIONS

One of the things that really frustrated me about searching for a job was when it felt as if there were no more places to look. Almost every morning the search would start with Careerbuilders, Monster, Indeed, Snag-a-Job, www.linkup.com and other job boards. Then I would check LinkedIn, Craigslist and MySpace for job postings and maybe email or call a couple of my contacts.

However to be honest, I really did not care for and tried to avoid completing online job applications. It seemed as if something would always go wrong. Often times the sites did not have a place for a carefully crafted cover letter. Then there were programs that insisted that the town where I live does not exist and the darn computer would assign a city on its own. Information would disappear and have to be reenter. Of course, that usually only happened on the page where the company asked two or three questions that required applicants to respond with short essays.

Nevertheless, I would press on like a good little job hunter because the goal was not to leave any stone-unturned during the job search. So, I tried to complete at least two online application per week. Most of the time on a Thursday or Friday, afternoon after I had run out of other places to look. Whether you have better luck with online job applications or if you are like me and only use them when you've run out of other places to look, below is a list of companies, most of which when last checked had multiple openings. Some of the jobs require a high school diploma others want degrees.

To see a company's career pages go to the Google search button, which has been conveniently added to the blog and type in the words "careers at" and then put the company name. For example, typing in careers at Johnson and Johnson should take you directly to the company's career section of their website. This phrase usually works on most corporate websites. So, if none of the companies listed below interest you, try typing in something that does -- such as careers at Burson-Marsteller.

Remember, most online applications use crawlers to search through the resumes and completed applications to determine which applicants background and experience best matches the job description. So use words from the job description when submitting your resume and completing the application. When there are questions that require you to compose a response, type-out the answer in Word then paste the response into the application. That way if the program fails to capture the information you will not have to start over again. Additionally, you can recycle the response if another application has the same or a similar question. And best of all you'll have the benefit of using spell-check.


Best of luck!