Last year, when Craig Lund decided he wanted a new job, the media sales manager chose a common path: He posted his resume on Internet job boards.

In less than a month, he was named Toronto account director for Aquent Marketing Staffing, a division of Boston-based staffing consultants Aquent Inc. But Mr. Lund didn't land the job through one of the giant boards, like Monster.com or its Canadian equivalent, Workopolis.com. He found it on a much smaller site -- one that targets a select group of job seekers based on salary, profession and experience.

On TheLadders.com, a New York-based employment site geared toward professionals earning $100,000 or more, "the caliber of the jobs was far different from Workopolis and Monster," says Mr. Lund. (TheLadders.com recently entered a two-year subscription-sharing partnership with CareerJournal.com, a unit of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.)

As the online job-listing market matures, niche sites, with their fewer and sometimes more relevant listings, are gaining in popularity. Like Mr. Lund, many job candidates have launched searches on both large and niche sites at the same time and say the niche sites produced faster results that were more targeted to their interests.

"Monster works well for a lot of people," says Adrian Tompsett, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. It just didn't work for him. Mr. Tompsett says he found his job through HBS Tech Jobs, a niche site aimed at tech-industry M.B.A.s from a handful of top M.B.A. programs. The site can be found in the Yahoo Groups section of Yahoo Inc.'s search engine.

"The jobs are all current," says Mr. Tompsett, now the business-development director at ChoiceStream Inc., a consumer-marketing firm in Cambridge, Mass. "There is good follow-up from jobs on the list, and it isn't digging through a bunch of stuff that isn't that relevant to me."

Specialized boards today make up some 70% of the roughly 40,000 job sites on the Web, compared with 50% or 55% of the sites in 2001, says Peter Weddle, editor and publisher of Weddle's Guides, of Stamford, Conn., a series of printed and online guides to Internet job sites.

Niche sites themselves are reporting strong growth in postings and unique visitors. Tech-focused Dice.com, run by Dice Inc. of New York, says it listed some 76,454 tech jobs in January, up 37% from a year earlier. Unique visitors grew 37% as well, to 1.9 million, over the same period.

None of this is to suggest that the general job boards are losing their edge. Revenue for online job boards is likely to reach $1.25 billion this year, up from $825 million in 2004, and as much as 75% of that is going to the big boards, estimates Lisa Rowan, program manager for human resources and talent management at market-research firm International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. Business is booming for Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com and HotJobs.com. Also thriving are the supersites that aggregate job listings from multiple sources on the Web. Among these are Indeed.com, a privately held venture with investors that include New York Times Co., and SimplyHired.com, a site owned by Simply Hired Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

Monster.com, the biggest of the big boards, says it tried a more niche-oriented approach some years back with segmented sites such as My.Chief.Monster.com, for executives. But given that "people can only bookmark so many sites," Monster found it more effective to return to one central site, says Doug Klinger, president of Monster Worldwide Inc.'s Monster North America division in Maynard, Mass. Yet the niche market still appeals. Monster owns or is a partner in some 30 niche sites: For example, it supplies job listings to a niche site for AARP, the association for older Americans; it's a partner in VeteranEmployment.com, a niche job site for military personnel; and it owns the similar Military.com.

To find the niche right for you, start by asking other people in your industry, or by looking at blogs in your field. San Francisco-based Barry Parr found his analyst job at JupiterResearch, a unit of MCG Capital Corp., through PaidContent.org, a blog about the business of digital media, run by Dis*Content Media LLC, of Santa Monica, Calif. Even blogs without the resources to hunt up their own job listings can be helpful to job seekers, thanks to software from Jobster Inc., of Seattle, that links job listings to relevant blogs.

Dice Chief Executive Scot Melland also recommends checking out sites about the job-boards industry, such as CareerXroads.com, run by staffing consultants Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, and Weddles.com, owned by Weddle's LLC, a human-resources research and publishing firm based in Stamford. Weddles.com gives extensive advice on online job-hunting, and its annual contest for the Internet's most popular job sites can offer a variety of niche starting points.

With so many options, it's important to look thoroughly for a tight match with your goals. Sites may target not only professions but also experience levels and age groups. Mayur Jain, for example, turned to AfterCollege.com, from AfterCollege Inc. of San Francisco, upon finishing his computer-science degree last year at Arizona State University in Tempe. He says he landed a job within a month, as a software engineer at Universal Laser Systems Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Others suggest trying to carve a niche out of general job sites by making use of their filters to narrow your search. At SimplyHired, for example, you can search based on multiple criteria, such as job location and company size. Indeed, even those who have landed dream jobs through niche sites recommend that job seekers use a combination of large and specialized job boards. Job seekers "shouldn't be limiting themselves," says IDC's Ms. Rowan. "They ought to look in all the places."