The Press Release Newswire recently released details about a new mainframe job site, BestMainframeJobs.com, garnering attention for its usability and searcher/poster friendly interface. According to the article, the job site “uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to maximize the functionality and usability of the website.”

But there is one drawback so far – there aren’t very many jobs posted. Furthermore, the few that are posted appear to be in the Lansing, Mich. area. To be fair, though, the site just launched and it will take a little while for it to build critical mass. Also in their defense, the interface is pretty cool – there is no refreshing, just point and click to find what you’re looking for.

But still, check out the jobs posted:

Those are all of them as of the posting of this blog. But I’m more will be on the way - BestMainframeJobs.com is offering a 50% discount on employers’ first post through October 31. Just use code JOBS07 when posting.

Without doubt, mainframers have been in need for a resource other than the job boards at Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com. I did a little perusing on Google for mainframe jobs and was only able to find a few articles. But a search on Yahoo proved to be a bit more productive.

First, there is JustMainframeJobs.com. This site has a simple Careebuilder-style interface and seems to adhere to the conventional tools for job searching - by location, by date, by keywords, etc. I did the default search, i.e. without the keyword or location fields populated and the date set to jobs posted in the last 90 days. The site brought back 15 pages worth of postings (291 posts) from diverse locations across the U.S.

Granted, as with most job boards, there are a lot of miscategorized posts and ads for jobs that you probably just don’t want. Another thing to keep in mind is that employers turn to job boards as a last line of defense, so consultant and IT career author Matt Moran told me in a recent IT jobs interview.

At any rate, to make a somewhat fair comparison between JustMainframeJobs.com and BestMainframeJobs.com, I set the JMJ.com filter to search for jobs from the last 14 days. This site returned over 50 posts - and from a salary standpoint, they didn’t look bad (at least compared to a tech journalist’s salary).

But I couldn’t stop there. More mainframe job board searching brought me to Dice, publishers of The Official Dice Technology Job Search Guide. Dice is not technically a mainframe-specific job search agent, but for all intensive purposes, I tried their services out to see how it worked. Their default search from the last 30 days brought up over 2600 posts. Again, discount maybe a third of those, but you still have a lot of organizations that need people. This (very unscientific) research adds fuel to once side of the debate about IT careers in general and to the mainframe job market in particular: one could induce that the evidence suggests a skills shortage, particularly on the mainframe.

However, without knowing how many mainframers are out there looking for work who are willing to relocate for the sake of their mainframe careers, it’s difficult to draw even a remotely solid conclusion. When SearchDataCenter.com runs its data center job survey sometime soon (word on the street is that it’s coming in the next 6 months) we might have a better idea. As an aside, I decided to test the writer/editor job market for something to gage the mainframe job market against. It turns out I went to school for the wrong thing.

With all of this said, what are your thoughts on the IT job market and job boards? How do you find new opportunities? Have you tried the ones mentioned in this post? If so, what are your experiences?