Friday, December 12, 2008

Oh, the Irony: Layoffs at CareerBuilder


Last week, online job bank CareerBuilder laid off 300 employees (see report here in the Chicago Tribune, a sibling in the same struggling parent company). These people were primarily in the unit that sold job postings to smaller companies.


HR blogger Cheezhead somehow knew about this ahead of time and spoke of the 300 boxes being brought in in advance for people to pack up their stuff. I guess that's another sign to add to the list of "how you know you're about to be laid off."


I was wondering the other day whether the dearth of want-ads right now is because there are no jobs, or because nobody wants to pay to advertise them. I guess this gives us a clue that the latter might be at least partially true. In a case like that, people should be refocusing their efforts on looking for those "hidden" jobs that you can find only through networking. Of course, that was always true, but now it's more true than ever. Also, check the companies' own sites and other free posting places, such as craigslist.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw that the NFL laid off around 150 people this week . . . if even they're not making enough money to pay those positions, you know things are getting pretty twitchy.

MJ said...

I was wondering the other day whether the dearth of want-ads right now is because there are no jobs, or because nobody wants to pay to advertise them.

I find a lot of job ads that I never see anywhere else just by clicking through on the "Careers" or "Employment" (or "Join Us" or whatever) link on web sites I visit, especially local ones. I send a lot to a friend I know locally who has been looking for a job for a long time, and she always says "How did you FIND that?" She has accounts at a couple of job sites, and reads the local classifieds compulsively, but never sees most of the ones I send her in those places.

A big advantage is that if I spend enough time on the site that I'm inspired to click on the Careers link, it's probably a company whose products or services I'm interested enough in to want to at least explore working there. :-)