This editorial was originally published on May 11, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

You'd think it would be easy, but I saw this post about looking for a DBA and I can certainly appreciate the problem. I've been in the situation of looking for someone to hire and getting hundreds of resumes for a position. In that case, I hate to say it, but I've sometimes only looked at the first 40 or 50 resumes I receive, sending the rest to a circular file. That's not the way to find the "best" person for the job, whatever that means, but it certainly means that the early bird has a chance at the worm.

But where is a good place to look? That really depends on where DBAs go to look for jobs, so where do you look?

In the past, when I was looking for a job, I used Monster and Dice, getting slightly different results from each. There were a few other sites I tried, but I'm not sure that any of these other sites do a better job of listing jobs. Since you need to have a lot of jobs and traffic to be useful, the larger the site the better. Also it seems that many consulting companies or recruiters post jobs to multiple sites (usually Monster and Dice), so I'm not sure you can find more jobs on any one site over another.

Today, however, I think I'd take a different approach to looking for a job, using the people I know, or my network, to see what's available. If I were hiring someone, I think I'd do the same thing. I posted in the thread that using your local user group, the people you know, contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. to post the job and let those people pre-filter for you, might be the best solution.

Hiring someone and finding a good employee is a hit and miss affair. I'm sure most people wish they had a better process, and a better way to evaluate someone's skills. I think by looking for recommendations from people, people that you will see again, you have a better chance of finding someone that fits the position.

Steve Jones

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