ALT-3 Website Reviews Careerbuildercom
Careerbuilder.com has a strong high volume base, perhaps second only to Monster.com in the overall number of listings. And the site has some solid support for members, but there are a lot of drawbacks to the site that limit its effectiveness. Note that Careerbuilder does appear to be improving on some of the more dramatic problems listed, but still has plenty of room for development.
Searches get a lot of responses due to the high number of listings, but a lot of the listings are of questionable value based on the searches. The locations are generally close to home and many of the headings appear to be very suitable, but digging deeper shows that a lot of the listings are of poor quality at best. There also appears to be no editorial process for the listings. Many listings show up for searches that have little or nothing to do with them, like Google searches with 10 million hits because two letters of the search match two letters in the web page.
In addition, no large-scale site has the plethora of apparent scam sites that Careerbuilder has. Beyond the hundreds of listings of work from home, there are dozens of sites that require "financial commitment", which seems to be the recipe for non-existent jobs or great opportunities to work full-time hours for part-time pay.
Careerbuilder does have some assets going for it. The development tools are solid, and less expensive than most other sites. There is a lot of duplication among them, though, with several paid sites offering the same analysis with essentially the same results. Also quite a few of the tools are of questionable value, many of which appear to be duplicated for free on other sites. Some of them are free on Careerbuilder as well, but you get what you pay for.
There are also far more than their share of on-line advertisements you must click through, many with apparent value for a job-seeker, but like most paid ads, they end up somewhere that charges you for little or no value.
While Careerbuilder does have a strong client base with a lot of listings, it cannot be recommended as a useful site for a job search unless you take every listing with a grain of salt. Also it is difficult to support a site that so obviously is squeezing every penny they can out of potential job-seekers. While some free job development tools are accessible, having to swim through the river of questionable or scam sites makes that a fairly futile exercise. Overall stick with Monster.com and several other smaller and more specific sites with more bang for the buck.
