Chicago Area Jobs

If you're a Chicago headhunter, human resource manager, or looking for Chicago area jobs, you have one of the most varied of local resources in the United States.

The Big Three recruiting Web sites - Monster, Careerbuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs - offer several thousand job listings each in the Chicago area. Here is where Careerbuilder can excel through Tribune Company’s partial ownership, providing co-posting with the Chicago Tribune. Employers who advertise their job openings in the Tribune also do so on Careerbuilder, with the opportunity to choose access to its voluminous resume database. In the last seven days alone well over 3000 jobs were posted on the Tribune / Careerbuilder sites.

The Chicago Sun-Times, the "other" daily, is part of Sun Times News Group, which includes dozens of other daily and weekly papers in the area. The Daily Southtown, for example, covers the south suburbs of metro Chicago, while Suburban Chicago Newspapers advertises jobs in the Chicago suburbs of Batavia, Plainfield, St. Charles, Wheaton, Fox Valley, and 13 other communities. Pioneer Press, a weekly Sun-Times publication, offers zoned Chicago job hunts or job postings in the employer’s choice of Chicago central, Northwest Chicago, Lakeshore, West Chicago or south Chicago's The Doings.

With a Sun-Times online recruitment ad package a recruiter can cover Chicago center and all the suburbs for those hard-to-fill jobs that require a broader reach, or neighborhood-focused advertising for semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. On the Daily Southtown site alone there are 1260 current job postings.

Another highly-focused local recruitment product, ChicagoJobs.com, is the brainchild of Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications, a Chicago-based three-generation family-owned recruitment advertising agency. What Joe and Joe Shaker Jr. began in 2003 has now expanded to about 15,000 job postings a month, through a partnership with 17 newspapers in the 11-county metropolitan Chicago area.

When a Grundy County employer posts metro Chicago jobs in the local Morris Daily Herald, for example, she or he pays $75 to repeat the ad on ChicagoJobs.com. The site also provides a resume database, company profiles, and banner ads. So successful has ChicagoJobs.com been for area newspapers, recruiters and job candidates that seven papers in Rhode Island approached the firm in 2005 to create RIJobs.com. Other offshoots include ILCareers.com and CTJobs.com in Connecticut.

Craigslist.org, another job hunt choice, currently displays more than 17,000 positions on its Chicago site. Here employers post for free, although it's a very basic word ad and not well policed. Job seekers should realize, therefore, that when it comes to the legitimacy of the job offerings on Craigslist it’s definitely buyer beware.

Job seekers have an excellent "one stop shop" for Chicago jobs in Oodle.com. This directory boasts 15 million classified listings from 60,000 sites. Chicago is one of the major search regions, and accessible from its home page. Today there are more than 71,000 Chicago area jobs listed on Oodle, easily narrowed down by zip code, category and keyword.

When you need to find or fill Chicago jobs you clearly have many local and expanded options.