[Hoot Gibson]

Some advice:

1. Take Career Builder and Monster with a grain of salt. There are a ton of job postings on there, but there are also a bunch of jobs you may want to avoid. Telemarketers, cold calling sales jobs, and other jobs with extremely high turnover use these sites very aggressively due to the massive amount of people on them. These companies are very good at impulsing you into interviews or multiple interviews and may be a HUGE waist of your time.

Also, as a small company I never post my openings on these sites because we simply don't have the time or resources to have to weed through the huge amount of resumes and interviews required in the hiring process.Just like there are many undesirable employers, there are also undesirable applicants.

This is good advice as far as it goes, but many companies search resumes that are posted on the major job sites but never post the jobs that they have available. This has been the best source of job leads that I have found in my field. I don't know what it costs for employers to be able to search resumes but many of them do so without advertising their openings.

As I said, if you make your resume searchable, you will get some emails from some characters trying to scam you - but it is pretty easy to spot the scammers and hit the delete key. If you are out of work, then it is worth the time and effort, IMO.

When I hire the first thing I want to do is either look at someone I already know or someone who is recommended by a friend.

This works for many types of jobs but in my case, the only job that I every got because of who I knew (an engineering job) was the first one I held after graduating from UK. Every job that I have ever had in the IT field, I have found through online job sites - or to be more accurate, employers have found me through those sites.

As for the rest of your advice, you make many excellent points.