Friday, January 19, 2007

Hot Advice For the Job Seeker, circa 1995


I changed careers back in 1996, deciding to pursue a career in recruiting. I'm now only eleven years removed from those happy days, but in terms of recruiting and technology, it seems (and looks!) like light years.

Check out this picture of Recruiting.com back in 1997. Yep, pre-Jason Davis.

Here's Monster back in Nov. 1996 (nice graphics).

Any other recruiters out there remember CareerMosaic?

And our beloved, HeadHunter.net?

Where are the blogs? Where's Google? Yahoo!? AOL? Where's the SEO buzz?
Where's Cheezhead? This is the earliest look I could find on our SEO Master (HERE). Hey, Joel, there must be something better than this, eh?

Job Search Advice

I then decided to fish out one of my job search books from 1995 called, "Hook Up, Get Hired!" (The Internet Job Search Revolution).

Great book... ...back in '95. It's still for sale on Amazon, and they have 11 used and new starting at $0.51.

Word of advice: save your 2 bits; not much revolutionary advice left on these pages.

The section titled, "Jobs You Reach By World Wide Web," focused on the following sites:

CareerMag.com
Career Taxi
CareerMosaic
CareerWeb
E-Span (remember the funky green color?)
Monster Board
MedSearch America
HotWired

Notice the emphasis on the word "Career?" Wanna take a guess at how many of those sites have been redirected to Monster?!

By Chapter 7, the job seeker is informed of their need to begin their search by purchasing a personal computer, a communications program, and getting access to a telephone line, and an account with an Internet service provider.

Here's the Top 10 Tips for Buying a PC:

  1. Don't buy a package deal that is made to look like a bargain (not bad advice).

  2. PC must have at least a 500mb hard disk.

  3. PC must have at least 4mb of RAM.

  4. Be sure to buy a PC that can be upgraded (still good advice).

  5. Buy a PC with a built-in modem (yikes!)

  6. Buy a PC capable of reading a 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch floppy disks (a what? my child says!)

  7. Buy a PC with a CD-ROM already installed to avoid future installation costs.

  8. Carefully choose your monitor. A 14" monitor may cause eye strain.

  9. Avoid strangely configured keyboards.

  10. Make sure you get manuals and diskettes for the software preloaded.

Wow - this is revolutionary stuff. Well, hey, maybe it was in 1995.

So much for the walk down memory lane. I'm thinking I like job-search (and recruiting!) in 2007 much better.

But just think how stupid that will sound in 10 years!

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