Using job boards is the most common approach to searching for a new job in Singapore. People log on to online sites such as JobsCentral, Job Street, Jobs DB, ST Jobs, Jobs Bank (now renamed MyCareersFuture.sg), Monster, etc, register their details, and indicate the industries and types of jobs they are interested in.
Many of these sites facilitate the uploading of a resume too – but that is a problem in itself as the resume will be generic or, at best, focused for one particular job but not for others. When recruiters search through a database for relevant resumes for a particular job, they use specific keywords related to that job. Those resumes focused on such a job will contain the appropriate keywords and will be selected for review. Generic resumes do not get selected in such a process as they lack a sufficient number of the appropriate keywords.
No wonder then that job boards have the lowest success rate in finding a new job – it is said that the success rate is between 3% and 4%, meaning that for every one hundred applications made or resumes submitted, you might only hear back from three or 4 of them!
When registered with a number of job boards, job hunters have to regularly log on and see what jobs the board has available – the more job boards a person is registered with, the more time this takes during their job search. A better approach is to use an aggregator such as Indeed.com. Aggregators do the searching for you. Much like Skyscanner that searches for flights on all airline and flight internet sites, or like Trivago that searches all hotel internet sites for rooms, Indeed.com searches through all the job boards as well as companies that advertise jobs on their own websites. So rather than you having to log onto multiple sites and spend time searching through them, Indeed.com does this for you.
For Indeed.com to work effectively for you, a bit of ‘trial and error’ is required in getting the search parameters exactly right for you. This may take a few attempts until Indeed.com is bringing up jobs that you are interested in. Once it does, you can leave it to do your job searching for you!
Another site that is increasingly getting good reviews from job hunters is Google Jobs / Google for Jobs. Google is the most advanced search engine on the internet and it makes sense to harness that search engine power to assist you in your job search. Before you use it though, it makes sense to google how to use it! If you are looking for the job of Business Development Manager and type that into Google, Google interprets this as a search for Business AND Development AND Manager, and will present you with millions of pages with these words. So, when using a phrase like Business Development Manager, you should enclose the job title in quotation marks – “Business Development Manager”. Google will then present you with only those types of jobs.
Like all job boards, it takes a little bit of ‘trial and error’ to get it right, and when you do, the results are much more useful.