By Kenneth Barbalace

Near the end of last year we partnered with CareerBuilder to bring our readers free career listings for environmental, chemistry and hazardous materials related careers. This partnership has been very well received by our readers and those I have personally talked to have absolutely loved our career listings pages.

What people may not realize is that each of the career listings pages on EnvironmentalChemistry.com is the result of a manual trial and error process to find what search phrases return the best lists of job postings. Well today I was googling the web to get new ideas for job titles and search phrases. I wanted ideas for new phrases to query against CareerBuilder's vast database of listings to create new "canned" career listings pages on EnvironmentalChemistry.com.

While working on my task of creating new job listing pages, I was stunned to discover that some career sites actually charge job seekers if they want access the website's job listings. For those who don't know, career listing services typically charge employers to post job listings, then in some cases they are turning around and charging job seekers to gain access to the listings the service is paid to post. Some how, this just seems very cheeky to me. Employers are paying for exposure and charging job seekers limits the exposure that job postings will receive. Charging job seekers for access to listing is a disservice to both employers and potential employees (especially when there are so many sites like ours that offer free access to listings).

In the face of all of the career listing services that allow job seekers to access listings for free, I really wonder how long those pay to browse sites can really last?

While I am on the topic of career listings; if you have not done so already, make sure to check out our careers section. You can even subscribe to RSS feeds for any listing page so that you can keep track of the latest careers you are interested in via your live bookmarks (Firefox or IE7) or your favorite customizable home page like "My Yahoo".

By Kenneth Barbalace

As part of the expansion of our partnership with CareerBuilder, we have added India to our list of countries that we provide career listings for. The list of countries we currently provide job listings for includes: Canada, India, United Kingdom, and of course United States.

If you are looking for a career that doesn't fall into one of our predefined listings, you can use our careers search box to create your own careers listing. Once you have found or created a career listing you want to monitor, you can subscribe to the RSS feed we provide for your desired listing via your favorite RSS reader or customized home page (e.g. "My Yahoo").

Happy job hunting.