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Soon after Susan Bruton moved to San Diego to take a job as human resources specialist at IXL, an e-business services company, she was laid off. Since she had few contacts in the area, she turned to the Internet to find a new job.

She signed up with national job sites such as Monster.com and HotJobs.com, where she searched for job openings and posted her résumé for prospective employers to review. She also frequented regional sites, HR-specific sites, and the Web sites of companies she particularly wanted to work for. Three weeks later, Bruton got a new job at CSA Travel Protection. A recruiter found her résumé on Monster and called her for an interview.

Piece of cake, right? It may sound that way, but finding a job online isn't easy. Even though she got several bites from interested companies, most of them were just nibbles. "The job sites gave me a false sense of security," Bruton says. "I'd get really excited about getting e-mail responses from different companies requesting more information. But then I'd never hear from them again."

Of the 82 prospective employers who looked at her résumé on Monster, only 1 called for an interview. Fortunately, that single call turned into a job she wanted. "I lucked out," she says.

Her frustration with online job hunting seems to be commonplace, according to both anecdotal evidence and a study by Forrester Research. Ads for some career sites suggest that you simply go online, check the listings, post a résumé, and--voilà--get a job. But in fact, there are a lot of additional steps involved. Finding a job on the Web requires quite a bit of legwork--even for human resources specialists, like Bruton, who are familiar with the ins and outs of the hiring process.

Nevertheless, the Internet offers bountiful resources that can help you. You can find career-development advice, tips for writing résumés, and industry gossip online to help you locate the right job. You'll need to research your field, craft a strong résumé, and look for jobs at relevant national, regional, and industry-specific sites.

Most important, however, you need to network--both online and offline. "Contacts are key to finding a great job," says Richard Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute? and a number of other job-hunting guides. "Without contacts, job hunters usually look for work in ways that are opposite to how most employers prefer to hire."

What's more, having good contacts will give you access to jobs that may never hit the career sites. When companies have a job opening, they look first within the company because they already know whether their employees do good work and have a personality that fits their office environment. If the cupboard is bare, employers seek recommendations from people in the company. As a last resort, they post an ad at a job site or in a newspaper, or turn to recruiters to look for viable candidates. Before we look at making contacts, however, let's explore the phenomenon of job hunting online.

Surveying the Situation

Many job sites, especially those listed in our table, list thousands of openings in a vast range of professions. But the quality of the jobs some sites post is less than stellar, according to a recent Forrester Research survey that asked 3000 users about their experiences with job boards. Some job seekers feel that ads are frequently misleading, according to Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "It's unclear if these jobs are real or if headhunters are just gathering résumés," she says. Instead of going through sites themselves, employers may hire headhunters to collect résumés, and then decide whether to pursue those prospects.

When Peter Weddle, publisher of Weddle's Newsletter and other guides for recruiters, asked people about their online job-hunting experience, he discovered that job seekers dislike how job sites work. Job hunters' expectations often exceed what they find online. They expect in-depth job descriptions, quick responses, and sites and links that actually work. But too often they encounter brief job ads (employers often use the same ads online as they do in the newspaper classified sections, where they pay by the word, so job descriptions are scaled down), long delays between the first contact and an interview, data forms that don't work properly, and sites with broken links.

Now for the good news: More employers are turning to the Web to find employees. And as more companies go digital with their want ads, the types of jobs listed online are growing more diverse. Today, as many administrative jobs as information technology positions are posted on the Web; just a few years ago, almost everything was technology-related.

One thing the Internet can't do for you is ace the interview. But Web sites such as Vault.com and WetFeet.com can give you pointers on how to impress your prospective employer when you finally do meet face-to-face. Now that you have a basic picture of the online job-hunting world, it's time to consider five essential steps that will help you find your dream job.