Title: Your 24/7 Online Job Search Guide
Author: Lamont Wood
Publisher: Wiley, 2002
ISBN: 0-471-12899-6
Price: £11.95

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Your 24/7 Online Job Search Guide is designed for those with little experience of using a computer. It contains some useful chapters on using e-mail, technical terms and protecting yourself when going online. These are interspersed with chapters relating to an online job search: from finding the best web site through to creating an online resume.

This is an American publication, which obviously has an emphasis on the online job search in America, although some of the suggested websites (such as Monster.com) are easily recognisable and have a UK counterpart. I always feel a bit of an outsider when reading “American” publications, especially those concerned with job hunting. This particular book actually reminded me of the bestseller “What Colour Is My Parachute?”

For me, as someone who regularly used a computer at school and now at work, the approach taken by this book is too simplistic. I feel that this is a cross between a how to use a computer/the Internet/e-mail manual, combined
with how to look for jobs online. As someone who is confident navigating my way around the Internet and having looked at/used online job sites previously, this book does not really provide anything new.

I think that a novice who really did not know how and where to start would benefit from this publication but it is a shame that its focus is on the US sites. This book can be read from cover to cover quite easily or used as a dip-in resource. The sections on the type of interview that you may attend and “Interview No No’s” seem useful reading, again for the novice.

Gillian Morris
HR Manager
Kensington & Chelsea Primary Care Trust