Webware

With the economy still in shambles, landing an internship might be the best way to get a foot in the door of a company that might hire you someday. But finding even an unpaid internship can be difficult. So here's a list of resources that are designed to help prospective interns achieve their professional goals.

If you're just looking for job search engines, check out our roundup from earlier this year.

Get your internship

BuddingUp: BuddingUp is a site that helps interns and recent graduates find the jobs they want. The site is broken into two sections: a job board and a career page listing. The former lists all the jobs the site has found across the Web that might be of interest to prospective interns. Unfortunately, you can't search it easily, so you'll be forced to scroll through the pages to get what you're looking for, which is not very convenient.

But the career pages listing is a fantastic resource. Instead of wasting your time going to individual company sites trying to apply for an internship, BuddingUp provides it all for you. So if you want to check for all the openings at Wal-Mart, Sony, or General Electric, the site will provide you with direct links to those individual career listings pages.

Enternships: Enternships is a unique site that helps you find internships at Web start-ups. It requires start-ups to list their gigs, which can then be searched for by interns who can apply directly on the site.

Since Enternships was started in association with Oxford University's Oxford Entrepreneurs program, many of the jobs listed on the site are located in the U.K. There are some listings for the U.S., but if you're in the States, Enternships shouldn't top your list until more listings are added to the site.

Intern Abroad: Intern Abroad is a really neat site. Instead of helping you find an internship in North America, the site lists all the open internships listed all over the world. So if you want to work as an economics intern over the summer in China, you'll find all the open listings (13 as of this writing) for those jobs.

Intern Abroad doesn't list individual jobs on its site, though. Instead, it provides search results of companies and organizations offering internships in the country you designate. That can get annoying, since you'll be forced to jump from site to site to get what you want, but considering it's a unique service, that downside can be overlooked.

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If you're looking for a new career, don't waste your time with the newspaper. There are a slew of outstanding job search sites across the Web that make it easier to find the career of your dreams.

Here are five prominent job search sites worth looking at, and why. See also our reviews of five lesser-known job search services.

CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder is one of the largest job search sites on the Web, but it's also one of the best. Combining millions of listings with extras like resume help and free career tests, the site is an ideal job search service.

CareerBuilder may feature a slightly cluttered home page, but with all the features it offers, it needs to. The site goes beyond simple job searching and allows you to browse by industry or work with partner sites to get personalized help in finding the perfect career. It even remembers your location after you leave the site, so you'll automatically be updated with new job listings every time you return.

Overall, I was impressed by CareerBuilder's bank of jobs. Searching for every job listing within 10 miles of New York City yielded more than 12,000 available positions. When I searched for accounting jobs within 10 miles of the city, it returned more than 2,500 listings. To some, that may be overwhelming and scrolling through them may be difficult. I understand that, but I'm a firm believer that the more jobs there are, the better the chances of finding the right fit. That said, I found that approximately 15 of the listings I examined were old and almost 20 others weren't available after I clicked on them. Maybe the site needs to do a better job of removing stale listings.

CareerBuilder also features a "Narrow Search" function under the search field, which allows you to pick specific companies, locations, and categories. It's a useful function that cuts down on search time and significantly improves your ability to focus on a handful of positions you're interested in. But if you're unsure which company you'd like to work for or exactly where you'd want to work, this feature probably won't come in handy.

Indeed

Although Indeed isn't nearly as popular as competing services like CareerBuilder and Monster, the site is simple and easy to use, making it an ideal choice for online job searchers who don't want all the extras you'll find elsewhere.

With the help of a simple layout--two search fields and nothing else--Indeed makes it easy to search for a job in any given area. Indeed allows you to search online job listings, newspapers, and other job boards, but it also provides salary information, forums to connect people of similar interests, and a job trends search field that offers solid insight into the state of any industry.

I used Indeed to search for jobs in fields ranging from accounting to law and it worked well. It even did a fine job of finding obscure positions like volleyball instructors and piano lesson tutors. In fact, I found that Indeed had more job listings than its major competitors in most of the searches I performed.

But if you're looking for extra features like resume guidance, Indeed isn't the ideal destination. It does have some extras, but most of them fail to compare on any level to those offered by competing services.

Monster
Monster is a well-known site that has solidified its position as a major force in the job search market. But the site's suspect design and relatively few search results leave much to be desired.

If Indeed offers the simplest design, Monster's is the most cluttered. The site sports a basic job search field next to a location search, but below that, the page is inundated with ads, extra job search features that the average user may not care about, and a worrisome warning from the company saying its database was illegally accessed and sensitive data was stolen. Needless to say, it doesn't instill confidence.

When I started searching for job listings in New York, I was surprised that Monster only returned 5,000. Thinking it was a small issue, I then looked for accounting jobs in the city and the service only returned 544 active listings. That's less than half of what CareerBuilder and Indeed returned, but it should be noted that unlike CareerBuilder's results, every Monster listing I read was active. Unfortunately, Monster doesn't offer a "narrow search" function like CareerBuilder, so finding a specific company's listings was made more difficult than it could have been. That said, I was happy with how quickly the site returned search results. It was the fastest in this roundup.

Where Monster really shines is in its extras. The site features tons of career advice, resume help, interview guides, and application history so you can see which jobs you've applied for. One of the best features on the site is Monster's Career Benchmarking tool, which asks for information about you and determines where you stand in your field as compared to your colleagues. It's a great way to find out if you're achieving your career goals.

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Using the best resources across the Web to find and interview for a new job is a big key to success. There are some sites that claim to offer the best service, but in reality, they offer generic help to unique people--not much help at all. There are some services that do a much better job of scouring the Web to help you find the perfect job.

Indeed

Although it competes with much larger sites like CareerBuilder and Monster.com, Indeed is one of the best job search sites on the Web.

With the help of a simple layout--two search fields and nothing else--Indeed makes it easy to search for a job in any given area. Indeed sets itself apart by allowing users to search online job listings, newspapers, and other job boards, but it also provides salary information, forums to connect people of similar interests, and a job trends search field that provides solid insight into the state of any industry.

I used Indeed to search for jobs in fields ranging from accounting to law and it worked well. It even did a fine job of finding obscure positions like volleyball instructors and piano lesson tutors. In fact, I found that Indeed had more job listings than its major competitors in most of the searches I performed. Combine all that with a great design, and it quickly becomes clear that Indeed is a great place to start when searching for a job.

JobSerf

If you don't want to do the heavy lifting of finding a job and you don't mind dropping $49 to $78 per month to have someone else do it for you, JobSerf might be a perfect solution.

JobSerf provides personalized job searching by taking your resume and cover letter and submitting them to employers on your behalf. The company claims that its sole purpose is to save you time in your job hunting and free you up for "networking, interviewing, or working." It even masks its IP address to fool HR and recruiters into believing the resume and cover letter were sent from your computer.

Though I'm not convinced it's always best to let someone else engage prospective employers in a discussion about your qualifications, it's an ideal solution for the busiest among us who don't have the time, energy, or know-how to find jobs online.

LinkUp

Did you know that 70 percent of all available jobs are only listed on the respective employer's Web site? That's what LinkUp claims and it's also the secret behind its business model.

Unlike Indeed and JobSerf, which take a look at published job listings, LinkUp continually monitors company Web sites to catalog all their job openings. Once a person searches for jobs by keyword, LinkUp delivers the pages that contain the open job listings on the respective company's site. But because it doesn't crawl online job boards, it should be noted that the number of search results it returns tends to be low. In fact, after searching for accounting jobs in New York City, the service returned about 2,600 results--almost 2,000 fewer than Indeed. That said, LinkUp claims the difference is due to its elimination of duplicate, old, and fake job listings that are commonplace on competing sites. Based on my searches, I tend to agree.

Realmatch

Instead of allowing visitors to simply search for jobs without providing any other service, Realmatch connects employers to prospective employees in a fashion that's similar to online dating sites.

From the site's home page, users are given the option of searching for a certain job in a variety of major areas across the U.S. Once complete, Realmatch requires the user to sign up and gives them the option of uploading a resume. Meanwhile, employers are able to upload job listings for free.

Once prospective employees and employers are finished uploading their information, Realmatch delivers employers a listing of possible candidates that match their requirements and gives employees a listing of jobs that match their skill-set. Users can then decide to apply for that position, modify their preferences, or leave their profiles active until a suitable position is identified.

The major issue facing Realmatch is the relatively small number of employers that have signed up for the service. At this time, it's only populated by a handful of notable companies, since few employers are willing to pay the service just to contact prospective employees.

Assuming you're in a position of hiring new people to work for your company (instead of laying them off), there's a new productivity boosting service called The Resumator that launched early Wednesday. It's part job-posting tool, part paperwork reducer, and also manages to throw in a recommendation engine that tells you which Web job boards are worth posting to based on the kind of job you're trying to hire for.

Of all the features, I find the most attractive one to be the document organizer, which sorts submitted resumes into different buckets for each job. You can search through these and narrow them down into groups by keyword, making it simpler to see who has listed certain skills, schools, or workplaces. It uses Scribd to convert each file into a browser-friendly document, and throws in a few neat Webby features like a five-star rating system and optional checklist that lets you quickly give each applicant the yea or nay in a centralized location.

What I really like about this system is that it's collaborative. Say, for instance, you're involving a few people in your company with a hiring process, you can give each one of them access, and they can rate each applicant respectively. I had helped out with this in a previous job, and Resumator's system would have been a whole lot better than wading through paperwork, adding sticky notes, and marking up each person's printed resume.

Resumator costs $59 a month and lets you post and manage an unlimited number of jobs. If you're trying to hone your resume, also worth checking out is Razume where others can mark up your CV and tell you what areas need work (Disclosure, Razume founder and CEO Sam Blum is an old friend of mine).

Related: The spreadsheet of sunshine: Who's hiring

Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health and general inanity (i.e. "SEX ME") before finally succumbing to "technical difficulties."

It remains uncertain whether the pranksters actually brought down the site, or whether MacRumors voluntarily took it down to keep things under control.

It's pretty clear, however, that this was the work of 4Chan, which has gained both respect and notoriety (depending on who you ask) over the past year for its persistent protests against the controversial Scientology sect in the form of an offshoot group called "Anonymous."

Over on 4Chan's labyrinthine forums, a couple of threads (warning: contains explicit language) hint at members' collusion to take down MacRumors Live, and the hacked live blog was peppered with declarations of "4CHAN FTW" (that's "for the win," for those who stepped in late).

This year's Macworld Expo has gained particular attention because Apple has announced that it's the last in which it will have a presence. Additionally, iconic CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of the keynote presentation. took his place.

The 4Chan skulduggery appears to have first been noticed by Twitter users and independent blogs like Topherchris.com, which took the screenshot above.

One Twitter user pointed to rumors on social-news site Digg that 4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords on Monday night.

It's a silly prank, yes. But it could have a big impact on MacRumors: this is likely the site's biggest day of the year, and the event could have an impact on both ad revenues and server costs.

UPDATE: It's not totally clear who's actually responsible for this attack. We've been getting a handful of e-mails indicating that it may have been a non-4chan group called Myg0t that was using the 4chan forums to organize, and another e-mail claimed credit on behalf of another forum community, Ebaumsworld. Indeed, screenshots show that one of the hacker messages read, "We are from Ebaumsworld. We are hackers on steroids."

Honestly? The world may never know.

This post was updated at 2:13 p.m. PT.

Another sign that Twitter is finally growing up: The company has put out a job posting hunting for a product manager to help it start raking in revenue. The San Francisco start-up, flush with venture funding and media hype, has yet to make a cent.

"As Twitter's first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter's business," the job description reads.

Gee! You don't say?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has hinted that the future of Twitter lies in some sort of corporate accounts. And indeed, the job posting says the gig involves the creation of "products and feature sets of commercial-oriented Twitter applications."

But it also asks for "strong familiarity with online advertising and marketing models," which means that Twitter advertisements may not be off the blocks.

Jowba is a new and pretty svelte looking job classifieds service. It's been designed specifically to help people find and post jobs for many of the companies we blog about here on Webware. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I'm a sucker for well designed Web sites, and Jowba is no exception--it's got both form and function going for it.

What makes the service particularly useful compared with Web sites such as Craigslist or Monster is that information about each company is a mandatory aspect of posting, making it a partial directory for all things Web 2.0. It's also completely free to post and apply to jobs, and any job that's been posted will respawn each month instead of expiring if no one ends up biting.

To help aid in the employment hunt, prospective job seekers have a variety of tools at their disposal, including built in maps of where each company is, along with a specially crafted search tool that separates jobs by various Web disciplines. Job posters have a little more power with a special in-box for resumes and tools to post and keep track of positions in a company that has multiple branches. They can also customize each job listing with a special area on the sidebar for leaving personal notes about the position.

There are only a handful of jobs on Jowba at the moment, but I'm assuming that will change as the company gets more aggressive about getting its name out there.

See also: Personforce, VentureLoop, and JobCoin (review).

[via TheNextWeb]

It's not what you know, it's who you know--and that's doubly true in Hollywood, where even a tech editor can be handed a DVD while waiting for a latte at the local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. (For the record, the movie was not good.) So I wasn't too surprised to read news that Variety, indispensable trade publication for the Hollywood machine, was launching a social network. Appropriately named The Biz, the site's described as the place where "entertainment professionals network, pitch products, exchange ideas, and search for jobs among peers and industry experts."

My knee-jerk reaction was snark, for example, how many waiters and dog walkers would I be able to find on the site? It didn't help that once I signed up I immediately received an invitation to connect with someone I had never met and with whom I had nothing obvious in common. However, after a bit of poking around I started to think that the idea makes sense. Hollywood is a project-based industry, with many of its workers moving to new jobs every few months, if not weeks. Keeping in touch with people you've met or worked with could very well result in your next gig.

The only way The Biz makes sense, though, is if it offers something different from existing social networking sites--and thus far it doesn't have much. Formatwise, the site looks a lot like LinkedIn (in fact, you can import your profile information from LinkedIn when you sign up), though it adds a few entertainment-friendly features, such as support for large headshots and the capability to embed a YouTube video of your demo reel. At this point the main benefit of the service seems to be its integration with Variety's paid job listings; once you've assigned keywords to your profile, jobs for which you might be qualified appear automatically on your landing page.

The Biz is still in beta, so there's plenty of opportunity for Variety to come up with ways to differentiate the site before its official launch. A better embedded media player would be a great start; a "pitch room" or a board dedicated to calls for submissions would also be useful. In the meantime, though, your people can call my people¹--or just find me on The Biz.


¹ Disclaimer: Author does not actually have "people." This is just a lame joke.

Standout Jobs' Reception is a hosted recruiting service for companies. It replaces the lame jobs pages that many companies run with a more developed service, including application forms, applicant tracking, support for videos, discussions, and so on. I like the idea, but I like JobScore's (review) model even more: With permission, it puts applicants that aren't hired into a general pool that hiring managers at other companies can pay to see.

Seen at: Demo 2008

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