Looking at the Job Websites
March 12th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Random ThoughtsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been solo for four years now and before that I worked for the same company for over 10 years, so I haven’t had to look for a job for quite a while, but cruising through the job websites recently left me feeling the whole space needed a kick in the ass.
Monster.com one of the few original dot com websites to have survived. Your interface was clunky, and difficult to work with. Your interstitial ads left me feeling you were more concerned about meeting advertising eyeball requirements than helping me find a job.
Criagslist.org easy to navigate but definitely falls into the “ugly sells” and Spartan design category. Got the job done but not elegantly or with a lot of extra features. Kind of like the Walmart of job boards.
CareerBuilder.com you’re everything that Monster.com should have been. Better features, more options, clean professional easy to use and understand UI. However the listings seemed dominated by big companies not a lot of smaller players. Small and mid sized businesses have to be looking for employees and I don’t think you’re doing a good enough job reaching out to them.
What would I like to see coming to employment websites, video in a big way. I’d like to see employers put out videos about why you should come work for them. This video from Google has some pretty high production value and is a little long but how about a 2-4 minute video, saying why I should come work for you. Next how about allowing applicants upload video of themselves. Maybe it’s strangely reminiscent of video dating but I could see a lot people making it work, sort of the YouTubization of the employment sector. Want an example here’s Jim Kukral using video to sell his consulting services, it isn’t a stretch to see how you could harness this power for an interview.
Lastly what about you employment websites? How about putting out video tutorials on resume writing, interviewing or other things. You could take a tech approach like tubetorial, how to put your resume online, or a strictly instructional approach like how to dress for an interview. Maybe some of you have heard of blogging, the SMO and viral ideas are practically endless.
Sphere It
March 12th, 2007 at 7:39 am
The Pros & Cons Of Personalized Search…
In the past two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to talk to both Marissa Mayer and Matt Cutts about the impact of personalization at Google. While the initial storm following Google’s announcement seems to be dying down somewhat, the ripple effects ca…
March 12th, 2007 at 8:04 am
[url=http://www.jobster.com/]Jobster[/url] has videos, among other things.
March 12th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Oops…sorry, about getting the tags mixed up.
Jobster.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:42 am
Thanks for link and video shot! Name is Kukral, not Kurkral.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:52 am
My bad fixed.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:54 am
http://www.indeed.com is probably the coolest around now (pretty much a job search aggregator)
March 12th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Yeah, video would be a good addition. Maybe there’s room for HR and marketing departments to collaborate there. Have you ever checked out Workopolis.com, though? A little scattered, but better than Monster by leaps and bounds.
March 12th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Yes, Indeed, I’m surprised you left out the job search engines!
March 12th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
I addressed this same point recently in a post:
9 Signs The Only Job Market Is Broken.
That post includes a video job ad from a Montreal-based startup…
March 12th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Thanks for the fix :0
Hey, forgot to post this the fist time. You want to know about jobs and recruiting? Check out my friend’s award-winning blog at http://www.cheezhead.com/
He was just featured in BusinessWeek.com. Good stuff.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
The real factor for job sites is the job listings, and if you look closely it’s a whole new level of spam in those big sites. There’s a whole story on that itself.
As for video by companies, how many HR people have you met who can present them selves well? You go because of the manager, and he is forced to put you thru the HR people. All we’d eventually get are slick commercials for companies, which will quickly not match reality and become meaningless.
March 14th, 2007 at 1:06 am
it seems like more and more of these job search engines are getting filled with work at home sales jobs
March 14th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Most job sites mentioned in the posts are full of spam (jobs that don’t exist, jobs/employers that don’t truly have openings or even facilities in certain localities, recruiters rolodex filling, etc).
BUT that is in fact one of the benefit’s of a job search engine… there are algorithms and engineers actively filtering out duplicates and spam of all kinds.
March 15th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Australian Job site SEEK is a solid example of a job site that has done a good job of cutting out the spam and maintaining quality content - no video though! http://www.seek.com.au/
March 18th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Michael, this is a great post! It was of good help (mostly inspirational) to make the list of the best tech job boards I just posted.
Todd, indeed.com looks very promising… missed that one. I’ll take a close look and probably add it to the list. By the way, I love your blog!
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
We are a recruiting group in a specific job niche and deal with Monster, Careerbuilder, et al everyday of the week.
You are absolutely correct with each of your observations and, if I had time, I could run out a list of a dozen other shortcomings. Tops on this list would be their ever increasing prices in conjunction with the creation of additional rules that are forcing job posters to post more jobs in order to reach the same range of candidates that one job used reach (cutting the pie in to smaller and smaller slices). Of course this is being sold as “a job search enhancements to better target the candidates”.
These changes only result in more ad revenue and more ads that the jobseeker has to wade through in order to find the few that are of real interest. This is a particularly sad (horrific???) situation on Careerbuilder where in our market niche some national employers with voracious manpower needs have unlimited postings and post the same jobs day in and day out, with one listing for each and every suburb, so they remain “at the top” of each day’s postings.
If you aren’t with one of these companies, your jobs get “submerged/buried” very quickly.
One last thing, a recent general cross-industry study showed that of the 3 largest jobboards, only about 3% of hires come from Monster, about 1.5% for Careerbuilder, and less than 1% from HotJobs.
Maybe this is where Monster got the idea of their ads hyping that you double your chance of finding a job if you post your resume with them…
Seems we’ve all bought in to the hype, item #8 on the “9 Signs The Only Job Market Is Broken” page mentioned above summed this up very well.
Recruiting is a numbers game and unfortunately our clients don’t think we are doing our job if they don’t see lots and lots of job postings and candidates. The majority would rather see a ton of unqualified candidates come through the door to interview than just see a handful of qualified ones. Guess it helps them to justify their recruiting budgets.