In a weak job market like we've got now, those Internet job boards are next to useless, as are headhunters. Why would a company bother to pay the commissions and posting fees and so forth if they can make a small announcement on their corporate web site and get more resumes than they can handle?

A few years ago, the job boards were reasonably effective, because employers were the ones who were desperate, not the employees. Dave and I both, some months apart, put our resumes on monster.com and had roughly 10 or so messages on our answering machines the next day from employers and headhunters who wanted to talk to us. We don't want to get back to that kind of job market, because the rebound created this one, but eventually we should get back to some kind of medium.

Even so, the job boards did get me a job two years ago, but the rest have been through networking of some kind. I got my current job because I unwittingly submitted a resume to a place where an old friend from college worked.