Online job searching is becoming the norm for young job seekers in many professions. Posting your resume on Monster.com or one of the many industry-specific online job platforms is now a rite of passage rather than the exotic approach to employment it was merely a few years ago.
As with so many technological advancements, the agricultural sector is following suit. Consider the hog sector, for example, where pigcareers.com seeks to become this profession’s on line employment clearing house (www.pigcareers.com). While its ambitions are only slowly being fulfilled (in early December, the site boasted only 18 job postings), it has the potential to be an important pork portal for those seeking to fill positions or to follow career opportunities in the hog sector. For a limited time, employers can advertise positions for free, though if the site takes off, employers will pay $250 for single job postings that stay listed until the job is filled.
More general agricultural employment sites also exist, with www.agcareers.com (part of the farms.com franchise) being one popular alternative. While less focused than pigcareers.com, it offers postings from all areas of agriculture and, for the adventurous, from all parts of the world. Compared to pigcareers.com, it featured a few more pork-sector job postings during early December viewing (about 23 versus 18 at pigcareers.com), though it took a little more trial and error during search to locate just those jobs associated with the pork sector.
More than ever employers in the hog sector and throughout agriculture are rediscovering the truthfulness of the old bromide ‘good help is hard to find’. Tapping into the power of the internet allows employers and job seekers one more way to locate mutually beneficial arrangements that continue to allow the industry to succeed.