Not only is it not your father's job search anymore. It's not even your slightly older sister's.

While employers still use headhunters to vet candidates, especially for senior positions, increasingly they are relying on resume scanning software and online "assessment" tests to do an initial sort of the wheat from the chaff.

And rather than posting an opening on a general jobs site, which can bring in too many you-must-be-joking candidates, companies are using jobs sites or parts of jobs sites that are specific to their industry, said Mark Bartz, cofounder of resume and job-search consulting firm Executive Careers Inc. They're also beefing up their corporate sites so potential hires with a specific interest in a company may submit resumes.

Increasingly, too, job seekers may submit resumes for a type of job rather than a specific job opening, said Ginny Gomez, vice president of product management of Peopleclick, a recruiting software and consulting firm.

When a job does open up, HR will electronically sort through the resumes looking for key words to find attractive candidates, Bartz said. (See Secret 2 on how to make your resume stand out.)

When you do use a corporate site to submit your resume, you may be asked a series of questions designed to give the employer some sense of whether your personality is a good fit for the type of job you're seeking and to test your advertised skills.

"(The questions) are an ever-growing component to a company's recruiting strategy and knowing this, candidates should know that by not completing an assessment, they are removing themselves from consideration," Gomez said.