But you'll never know until you try!

While the Web can help many aspects of your job search, from posting your résumé online to getting career counseling, let's focus on finding the actual job listings.

1. Target a few desired companies. Have you ever heard a friend talk about how his or her company has great benefits, then found yourself thinking: "I wish I worked there"? Think back over similar incidents and jot those companies down. Or maybe there are only a few companies in your area that hire candidates with your skill sets. Identify them.

Then search online to see if any of those companies have home pages. If a company has a home page, there's a good chance it will list available jobs.

One of the advantages of this approach: You could get a jump on other candidates! Sometimes it's easier (and cheaper) for a company to advertise openings on its home page than in the newspaper, which may mean that fewer people see the listings and apply. The disadvantage: Some companies forget to delete the listing once the job has been filled.

2. Find a professional organization or trade publication for your chosen field. Nearly every career category has at least one professional association and publication, and many of these have Web sites that list job openings. If you're not aware of any such groups online, try doing a search with key words that pertain to your profession. Also try a few searches adding the words professional, organization or association.

Once you find a site, there's a good chance that it will list many openings related to your skills. You may also find an opportunity to subscribe to a mailing list that will regularly send job listings to your email address. The downside is that several of those jobs may be in other states.

3. Select a few comprehensive job-hunting Web sites. For sheer volume of current job listings in one site, CareerPath is the way to go. The site boasts a searchable database of employment ads from dozens of newspapers around the country, and the ads are never more than two weeks old.

The Riley Guide is a highly acclaimed site that not only features lists of openings but many other resources. The specific career listings, however, are collections of links, which yield mixed results.

For listings and even more helpful advice, check out What Color Is Your Parachute: The Net Guide. Best- selling author Dick Bolles (What Color Is Your Parachute?) heads up the site, dispensing wisdom and reality checks, like: "My personal estimate of the effectiveness of job-listing sites on the Internet: one percent, if the job you're looking for is not computer-related; 40 percent if it is."

Other experts aren't as pessimistic. Pam Dixon, co-author of Be Your Own Headhunter Online, says: "The perception is that if you're on the Internet, your IQ automatically goes up ten points." Thus online job-hunters are more marketable candidates!

As you know, searching for a new job is about diligence and using your resources wisely. The Web is one such resource, and you'd be wise to consider the spider, who patiently uses the web to snag its livelihood!

1. Start by picking a company, see if they've got a web site
2. Does your field have a trade organization and/or trade magazine?
3. Three good sites: Careerpath.com (most current), The Riley Guide, washingtonpost.com/parachute

1. As a place for you to search for vacancies, listed by employers (often called job listings)
2. As a place to post your resume
3. As a place to get some job-hunting help or career counseling
4. As a place to make contacts with people who can help you find information or help you get in for an interview at a particular place
5. As a place to find information or do research on fields, occupations, companies, cities, etc.

We come here to the sites that make many job hunters salivate: the promise of access to millions of vacancies, help-wanted ads, or 'job listings,' posted on the Internet by employers. Indeed, one Web site kept track of its visitors and found that the largest number of those visitors -- 33 percent -- went to the job listings, as compared with 26 percent to the next most popular area there -- salary surveys -- and just 13 percent to the place where they could put their resume online.

Job listings! What a lovely sound! A new place to meet employers. Thousands of job opportunities, listed on the Internet! Ah, yes. How true! But just keep in mind two teensy, tiny little problems as you explore these job listings.

The first is this: people's naive vision of the Internet is that it offers one central, unified place, where you can find a list of all available jobs in your own geographical region, if not in the whole country.

Unfortunately, the reality is that we currently have 11,000 sites on the Internet dealing with jobs or careers. So, if you want to find out what jobs are posted on the Internet, you have to go to hundreds if not thousands of different sites to find that out. Yuck!

What you will not believe, until it happens to you, is that it is possible to hunt through all these listings on the Internet, and still not find one job that interests you -- unless of course, you're in the computer field, in which case the Internet is essentially like striking it rich.

How can this be? How can you strike out so dramatically? Well, that brings us to our second problem: the infamous hidden job market.

What that phrase means is that employers, generally speaking, prefer every other method of filling vacancies that there is, before they will resort to want ads or job listings. For many if not most of them, want ads or job listings are their court of last resort, used only after all other methods have failed.

If employers can fill their job vacancies without resorting to want ads or job listings, they will; and in 80 percent of all cases, they succeed. Hence the familiar statistic, for decades: "80 percent of all jobs are never advertised." Never advertised on the Internet, nor anywhere else.

What all this means for you is this: By all means browse these job listings. You may find just the opportunity you are looking for. But don't get discouraged if you don't. Only 20 percent of all available jobs in this country ever get advertised, by employers. The rest wait for you to find other ways of finding them.

Just post these words above your computer, and keep them ever in mind if you've spent hours surfing through page after page of job listings, and have found nothing that interests you:

Riley Guide: "This is the best by far. If I could only go to one gateway job site on the Web, this would be it."
-- Richard Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute: The Net Guide