How to Job Hunt While Hard at Work

OUR CAREER CHOICES ARE AMONG the most important investment decisions we'll ever make -- because that paycheck underwrites so many other bets, like housing, education and retirement. And a growing number of employees have concluded that the best way to move up is to move around.

According to international-employment-matchmaker Randstad's latest World of Work Survey, more than half of today's employed are searching the Internet for a better situation; yet most profess to be happy in their current jobs, despite a 41-to-60-hour work week.

A just-released study by the Conference Board (www.conference-board.org) confirms that almost three-quarters of job-seekers are pounding virtual pavement. They're scanning Internet job boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com and networking with friends, acquaintances and friends of acquaintances on sites like Facebook (www.facebook.com) and its business-networking predecessor LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com).

TRADITIONAL JOB-HUNTING METHODS -- checking on newspaper classifieds and such -- are still in the mix. But c'mon, everything is so much easier on the Net, especially, for Generation X and Y workers, who grew up with cellphones, instant-messaging and their own personal MySpace (www.myspace.com) advertorials.

More than half of job seekers admit that, whatever else is going on, a low-level job hunt is the perpetual subtext -- not just on Facebook, but wherever people of similar interests gather.

Craigslist founder Craig Newman insists that the popular craigslist.org wasn't intended to be a job site. But employees and employers just naturally connected on its city pages. Sites like Craigslist have had such an impact on the revenue streams of the real-world classifieds that 19 major newspaper chains recently hopped into the arms of Yahoo!'s HotJobs (http://hotjobs.yahoo.com) to link local and Internet job databases......

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