• BusinessWeek, Monday, March 16, 2009 11:45 AM

Experts say spending hours going through listings on Monster or CareerBuilder isn't necessarily the best way to hunt for a job. According to consulting firm CareerXroads, just 12.3% of hires of candidates from outside a company come from those kind of job boards, with about half of that total actually coming from Monster and CareerBuilder.

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek says that both companies are losing ground to social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, even Twitter. Here's why: according to the CareerXroads report, which looked at the hiring practices of large companies, referrals from both employess and corporate alumni made up 27.3% of all hires in February, suggesting that referrals could be the best way for outsiders to land a job at a company.

On Twitter, for example, a message can easily be re-tweeted and instantly seen by thousands of people. As one marketing firm exec experienced recently after posting a job on Twitter: "Within 15 hours, this tweet went from a few thousand to 15,000 people." Twitter may be a great tool for spreading the word about a job, but it can be "unwieldy" for applicants, says BusinessWeek's Rachael King. For example, Twitter users can sign up to follow AT&T's jobs board at @attjobs, but the postings are about every available position at AT&T with no filter based on position or location. To be a really useful jobs tool, Twitter will have to implement some kind of filtering tool for applicants.

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