Over the years Job Hunting has evolved into a hard to navigate blob of frustration. It used to be that you could just walk into a place of business to fill out an application, and that’s it; you get a call or you don’t. All you have to do is write your resume once, and print it up. Now everything is online.

At first it was kind of cool, but it has become difficult to navigate and even dangerous. Such sites as monster.com, indeed.com, jobing.com, and others claim to help out, but after dozens of hours spent on these sites I have only had a few good opportunities and a whole lot of hassle. When I first started i used Craigslist until I sent my resume to some polished sounding business that turned bad quickly and I ended up calling the police to find out how to take steps towards protecting my identity.

These sites want you to upload your personal information in your resume which has address, phone, locations worked, timelines, etc. and hand deliver them to entities you don’t know and may never hear from. It is a dream come true for would be criminals. What’s even more frustrating is you take the time to upload your resume and then many of the job opportunities redirect you to a site where you have to enter all your resume information again in the format they want. Or at least subscribe to their site before you can view all the job details. I end up spending three hours applying to five jobs and don’t get a call back from any of them.

So my question is this: Does anybody know a better approach? I have tried going directly to businesses like in the good old days but they just tell me to apply online and that I can’t apply in person. So what strategies have you used? or know of? that might help make job hunting less of a supremely time consuming nightmare?