“The next evolution of online job searching would seem to be within social networking websites where users could refer friends to a job.”

Doostang comes to mind here. From my experience they seem strong in the MBA type of job markets.

e-Harmonize the job market? What rubbish. e-Harmony has a horribly low success rate. It’s probably a 1% success rate, compared to online job board’s 2% rate.

Social networking might help, but it’s also fraught with landmines. Sometimes you refer your friend not because they’re good, but they need a job. And do we need yet more nepotism?

Online job hunts still suck, just like offline job hunts. Kinda reminds you of dating doesn’t it?

I think this service will be a hit. I just how it does not
follow old the theory who you know…..not what you know.

I someone makes a great referral, then they should be rewarded with
some commission. This app. has the potential for everyone to acquire some
online income.

Does the site plan on implementing an affiliate program?

“There’s also whototalkto.com which looks a lot like LinkedIn at first glance but operates more like Match.com in practice. Not sure if you’ve covered them, but they’re interesting at least in that they’re not even posting classified ads. Everyone you’ve mentioned either posts, networks or aggregates the same classified ads that the newspapers have had for 200 years. I want to see a player emerge that leave the classified ad behind and delivers a new kind of job search. What kind? I don’t know. Informational maybe.”

I am 35 year vet of the business and not-for-profit worlds and now teach for DeVry University. I tell my students all forms of job hunting suck except personal networking. Somehow people saw the internet as the salvation of job hunters (and people looking for employees). All the internet did was speed up and enlarge the mostly unproductive and unsuccessful efforts people had been making through traditional methods of job hunting. So they failed faster and in larger numbers.

85% of the newly created jobs in the past ten years were never posted anywhere (online or offline) they were filled by networking. Furthermore, at least 70% of all jobs are filled by networking.

Everyone will tell you they know someone who got this great job from on online posting. Ask one of these people to tell you the fortunate job hunters name or the company that hired him or her, they can’t. It’s mostly urban myth.

The bottom line is people hiring know they will be working closely with the person 5 days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day and sometimes traveling with them. People will first hire individuals they know and like. If that isn’t possible, they will hire individuals recommended by people they know and like. If that isn’t possible they will go for experience and lastly its potential.

I’ve seen it too often, I’ve done it myself often enough to know this is why most forms of job hunting suck except personal networking.

Have you tried Jobster.com (www.jobster.com)?

Jobster.com sucks. Who’s going to post an honest review with their name next to it. Nobody is going to post a review talking about the lack of growth opportunity with their name next to it, because it could hurt them when it comes to reference check time during the interview process.

Should be interesting. The Big Three are all aligning with newspapers (the very entities they were supposed to take down), while the toy with the idea of becoming verticals themselves. HotJobs spiders from the Web and Monster has FlipDog.

All the while, the verticals are doing their best to drive serious traffic, making money off the job seeker via PPC and resume affiliate programs. And the social networking strategy is yet to be played out.

Indeed and all those scraper sites are lame.

Micha, almost every job I’ve gotten over the last 10 years have been through job postings, including my current gig as a sr software engineer for a top 5 web firm.

As someone who has worked both sides of the table, I can tell you that online posts work just fine. Nothing wrong with personal networking, but it comes with its own set of negatives.

Job hunting sucks. Always has, always will, and no technology can change that. If you can find me someone who says he/she enjoys the process, I’ll eat Pinochio’s nose and show it on YouTube.

In terms of sifting through candidates, iprofilecentral.com helps here. However I found when looking for a job that the quality of structured data is the fundamental problem, especially in the UK where many jobs are with agencies and intentionally vague so you can’t guess the client and approach them directly. The biggest problem is the “non job”, ie you apply for a job, get shortlisted, look like your going to get it then it “goes away”. Hiring freeze, unexpected internal recruitment, funding problems, on hold, etc etc If recruiters were as organised and polished as they ask the candidates to be then there wouldn’t be half as many problems as we’ve got!

Craig
(who was in the papers publicising my online job matching service in 1989 and is forever regretting being unable to take it forward then)

Hi,

I dont know if your aware of the Jobs site at Snap.com but we have a system that uses a mutliple table refinement system as fast as you can type… So you can narrow your opportunities down by a wide variety of criteria (ex. title, city/st, compant, salary, etc.).

Its a system that has feeds from all the top niche job sites and so at any one point in time you have access to over 5MM+ job listings..

Disclosure: I work for Snap.com but if I myself were looking for a new gig, I would def use this site as opposed to any of the others. Check it out! It just makes looking so much easier, as in most cases people jump from one to another to find the best listings… I hope this does not sound like an ad or pitch as its really not… it is just a very useful site for a job seeker!

http://jobs.snap.com/

Best,
Jason.

I really like Jobster.com. Of course no one is going to post anything negative about a company when their name (and sometimes picture) is attached to the comments. The feature that is so great though is the ability to leave a note for anyone with a profile.

If I am interested in a particular company, I can look up people who list that company on their profile. I can leave a note for one of those people and hopefully begin a correspondence or at least glean more info about the company (how they got their job there, what path I should take, who else they know, etc…). It allows me a way to create an internal contact where I may have had no “in” before.

YAHOO! We get to see Sam the Hired Man eat Pinochio’s nose on YouTube…! Read this post and tell me she doesn’t love the process (make sure to read the last sentence): http://www.carolynnduncan.com/.....o-problem/

I was laid off in January and began my job search, mostly with posted jobs (read: on job boards). Every aspect was discouraging (and confusing - that is why I created http://www.JibberJobber.com to help organize it). I never thought I’d be unemployed, but it was through this process that I realized that too many people (and I am first in line) spend way more time on their job than their career. Nothing will be the silver bullet - some will get jobs on boards, many through networking. Its not fun at all - but face it - we are changing jobs every 3 - 5 years. So what are you doing about it??

BTW, there is an EXCELLENT use of the tools mentioned above. If you think that applying for a job through a board or ad is a waste of time (it might be), think about the information you can get - who is hiring, what departments are growing, names of hiring managers, etc. This is terrific “competitive intelligence” that you can/should use in a job search - so don’t discount boards totally.

Like one of the posters above, I’d like to mention http://www.whototalkto.com

But full disclosure, I’m one of the founders.

Still, Steve, you might be interested in checking it out. We founded WhoToTalkTo for the exact reasons you mention: frustration with the current job search model and the lack of innovation in this space (http://www.whototalkto.com/aboutus.html)

What about theladders.com? I think the seeker-pays model (versus the employer-pays model) makes a lot of sense for both seekers and employers alike. While it is positioned at the higher end of the job market ($100k and above seekers), seekers benefit by the jobs posted being “real” and at the desired level of comp and responsibility. Employers benefit through a degree of self-selection as only people with a shot of landing a $100k job will pay for the priviledge of viewing these positions. Seems like a sensible, straight-forward model. As an employer I like it because we’re not flooded with resumes a la Monster and the like. I don’t have much experience with the sites mentioned (though I’ve also had success with specialized sites like Dice). Just my two cents.

Roger,

ladders.com is useless. Postings are dated, and often these positions are already filled.

Don’t waste your money to connect with some clueless recruiter.

Wow, Jason. I just checked jobs.snap.com and was impressed with how easy and fast it is to review large number of job openings in fewer minutes with your 2-pane design.

Is anyone aware of http://www.jobcentral.com ? They are the fastest growing full time job site, and you get direct access to hundreds of the biggest employers positions without having to join a job-board database.

They update the jobs every night - so you are guaranteed to get the freshest positions, and again you apply directly to the companies which should give you a better chance of getting considered for any positions, because companies post all their positions on this site, not just ones they are willing to pay job boards for.

Also, http://www.HotGigs.com is the biggest contract/consulting job board (our website). Has both consultant-paid and free subscription model, and rate research to see what the hourly bill rates are for contract related skills.

Such negativity …..! Might it be because most job boards and job search engines fail to return a modicum of relevant search results!

Show me a job search that favors search results relevance over ad content and clever features, and I’ll show you a job search engine that cares about the user experience.

Let’s change the tenor of this discussion … and, focus on job search results relevance.

Experience the difference between mediocre and exceedingly relevant matching job leads at Just-Posted.com (http://www.Just-Posted.com).

Check out http://www.getthejob.com, also a new aggregator of jobs.

GetTheJob.com aggregates jobs only from the corporate career centers of acutal hiring companies. No staffing agencies, headhunters, third party recuiters or too good to be true work at home job scams.

Interesting topic. I posted a rant on my blog about clueless recruiters on LinkedIn The comments led me to various blogs about the topic.

Good work, Jason! Looks like you won’t be seeking a job soon… you already have got a business.

Wow - some really interesting comments generated on what’s to like, what’s not to like about job boards. Honestly, sounds a lot like some of the points I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago (http://jobsyntax.com/blogs/jobgals/archive/2006/11/15/job_boards_state_of_the_union.aspx)

I think what’s missing here is that many job boards are really developed in a vacuum - no one is creating a tool that addresses the needs of the job seeker, recruiter or employer. The use of social networking is only a partial answer; you still need to develop a tool that is robust technically, can implement some type of quality control gates AND can address the needs of those looking to be hired or to hire someone.

The profiling approach is one that has been and is being tried by solutions like Market10 and others before them. It’s everyone’s first response to the firehose problem, but there are several reasons it wouldn’t work in the way you propose.

The main problem is that neither recruiters nor job seekers are willing to invest the time to go through a long profiling process: the passive job seekers, i.e. the ones that are usually the most desirable to employers, won’t have the patience to go through such an annoyingly long experience because they’re not desperate to get a job and are probably already being courted by multiple employers; and recruiters are so overwhelmed by requisitions or apathetic that they’ll never do more than post and pray (post a job and pray that they get responses).

Automation to the point of complete simplicity for all parties is the only solution that will work in the online recruiting space. Anything that requires effort is a waste of time, money and space.

I agree, people will use an automated system that is simple to use, hiding all that processes behind the curtin much like Google.

The big jobboards as well as the big verticals are owned by media owners. Media owners are interested in maximizing paid content, not in maximizing user experience through providing relevant results. This is why jobboards still provide a poor experience.

Jobster is a vertical (Workzoo), combined with an e-mail blaster (spun into ‘referral’) and a great marketing message. Again, owned by media.

The technology components to deliver relevant results while providing a great user experience are out there. It involves matching, but it also involves extraction. But it should also include ‘irrelevance spam filter’ to allow recruiters and candidates closing their e-mail inbox doors for paid for ads posing as job or candidate offers making media companies money

It requires a different breed of companies, not controlled by media, to deliver these solutions. And they are coming…

Social networking site with referral based recruitment. http://www.spotajob.com is starting to get there.

Micha: You rant against finding jobs on the internet and you claim that personal networking is the only good way to find a job. Then what do you make of leveraging online social networks (which is personal networking) to find a job?? It’s one of the key points in this blog entry.

5 truths:

1. job postings should be free. the value is not and never will be in the posting. the value is in connecting with the right person to hire. job postings are still in a “dumb listings” (non targeted) business model. over time this market will move more and more towards targeted advertising and meaningful transactions — but that is going to take time and a lot of innovation will have to occur along the way.

2. employers are struggling with the quality vs. quantity gap in online recruiting. job boards provide quantity while hiring managers desire quality. while one would expect the hiring managers to win that battle and to refocus recruiters around finding quality, in reality that requires a behavior change which will take time to enact. the fact is that most corporate recruiters are addicted to the big job boards because they provide a steady stream of candidate flow — and when you are a recruiter who is loaded with many open positions and goaled/graded based on how fast you fill them, it’s hard to think about going to hunt for quality when there’s a steady stream of quantity showing up in your in-box each day.

3. the value of job boards (as we know them today) is beginning to erode for employers with well known brands as most active jobseekers are more than able to go directly to the career websites at companies like starbucks, microsoft, google, etc. where the jobs are already listed and the employer has more control over the candidate experience. and, many leading employer brands are finding that they are getting enough of the quantity described in #2 coming to their own front door, enabling them to rely on general job boards less and refocus their resources around their own corporate career sites. vertical search further facilitates this as jobseekers can search for jobs and go direct to employer sites vs. going through a job board middleman.

4. referrals have been and always will be a great source of quality hires. not the only source, but an important source. employers who get this — and who optimize their recruiting process around it — are able to gain competitive advantage vs. those who do not.

5. as has occurred in other markets like travel, and as is increasingly transpiring in real estate, over time we will see new marketplaces evolve which eliminate the need for the specialist (recruiter) and enable the purchaser (hiring manager) to transact efficiently with the seller (candidate). self service. pay to target and find the right person vs. pay to post. that will turn this market on its head. will take some time though.

I used http://www.emurse.com during my recent job search. It allowed me to create a host my resume online and search job postings for free. Definitely worth checking out..

John (30),

Just checked out http://www.emurse.com from above — Thanks for that link. I have been looking for a service like that for a while now, and the fact that they will host and convert your resume for you is awesome.

Used properly, it’s a priceless tool…

Stop shilling bastards.

As one who has been involved in atleast 3 job hunts in recent years, I can vouch for three services - primarily craigslist, lately simply hired and my bet on the future is w/ LinkedIn.com.

I loved craigslist (found my first job through them) and lament the fact there’s not much opportunity to network, simplyhired is definitely a comprehensive search engine but the core differentiator I’m looking for would be the professional networking aspect.

I agree with Micha when she says: “People will first hire individuals they know and like…this is why most forms of job hunting suck except personal networking.”

Miguel says: “… all the jobs I’ve had were through referrals and recommendations. I have no plans of changing that.”

Exactly! Putting these ideas together makes LinkedIn a perfect candidate that aggregates your professional background as well as making it easier to be referred or recommended. Personally, I loved the recommendations tool on LinkedIn…my most recent job hunt was successful due to the fact that the employer was able to read the recommendations and also verified the same with my recommender to ensure I was the right candidate. He could also choose to talk to a recommender who was closer to his “six degrees” because he’d trust them more.

I agree that lots more improvements are needed but if I were to place my bets on the one service that could “e-harmonize job hunting” it’d be LinkedIn since they already have the business networking feature crafted to perfection.

p.s. http://www.emurse.com definitely sounds interesting but I haven’t used that one, esp. since I already have my resume on LinkedIn!?

I agree with Mario re: recommendations… my comment above was about misuse of LinkedIn by recruiters!

(this is Jason #14 from above)

Sam the Hired Man (#10) - still waiting for the video about you eating Pinochio’s nose (see my comment in #14)

Jason Goldberg (#29), regarding your 3rd point, agreed, but it is uber-frustrating as a job seeker to have to check multiple boards from employers - takes a ton of time :( Not just the issue of new postings (which can come via e-mail or RSS), but an updated on postings that I applied to.

Mario Sundar (#33), there is a huge difference between using LinkedIn and Emurse.com… I strongly recommend both. The thing that Emurse.com gives you is the ability to have multiple resumes and then spit them out in various formats depending on what your needs are - LinkedIn doesn’t do this.

A perspective from Asia, I am with http://www.recruit.net - a job search engine covering this region.

The main Asian markets (China / India / Australia) are all individually dominated by 2-3 traditional online classifed sites (think Monster). Job aggregation is just catching on now and no clear leader has emerged. Obviously we we feel this is a great opportunity. Going online to find a job is very popular amongst the more than 110m Chinese Internet users and in India recruitment sites are one of the top moneymakers (along with matrimonial sites).

We see the synergies between what we do and social networking sites and so are talking to local players in that sector. So far we haven’t seen many initiatives like this.

Each country has their own nuances which need to be dealt with, for example China has the largest number of duplicate job postings across the Internet so our de-duplication algorithm is entirely different for China. Australia is a very agency driven market which presents its own set of challenges. Japan is a very segmented market you have the Gaijin (foreigners) and the native Japanese and typically their online search behavior is very different.

Current day jobboards aren’t a great experience, to say the least. But aren’t online referral programs destined to go down the same road as jobboards?

When wanted ads were only in print, it took a lot of effort to apply when compared to current day online alternatives. The result? Print delivered more relevant applications and less overall applications. Today the promiscuous digit can apply to numerous jobs with just one click.

When referrals are reduced to forwarding e-mails it doesn’t take too much foresight to see the promiscuous digit luring around the corner. Poor e-mail inboxes of recruiters and candidates alike…

Isn’t it therefore better to examine the flaws of the jobboards and try to fix them, instead of discarding them without lessons learned? And just leap forward, spinning the next marketing message? To find in two years time that nobody delivered on the promise … again?

what is going on with MKT10 anfd H3.com? I know MKT10 was toting itself as eharmony meets monster.

http://www.businessweek.com/te.....han=search

Does anyone have any experience with these sites?

One of the best models I’ve seen for job sites is petersnewjobs.com

He focuses on two cities and keeps track of all the latest job postings almost before they become public and then sells subscriptions to people who are looking for jobs.

But the problem with these job sites is that almost all jobs go based on “knowing someone on the inside”.

No problem.

This is a very interesting stream, with most bashing job boards (too many jobs, not enough jobs, too many candidates, not enough candidates), promoting networking (Love to know where the 85% and 70% data quoted by Micha comes from), aggregator job boards (because job seekers are lazy - i.e. it is too much work to look at all of the company career sites), etc etc.

Yes, looking for a job is often harder work than working. Yes, looking for the right candidate is hard work. There is no ’silver bullet’ or one size fits all solution. All recruitment is about blended strategies, getting the medium and messages right for your business.

Networking tools (LinkedIn, Jobster et al) can help to manage the relationships and data about individuals. Job boards get the job out to many more individuals across geographic and time lines. Print is still valuable in certain sectors or job types. Search is necessary for ’sensitive’ or time critical roles.

We seem to miss the point often enough in recruitment that we generally start with two documents completely ill-suited to the task: the CV/Resume and the job spec. Neither is in a structured data format, which means that the potential for ‘matching’ accurately is unlikely happen. Marc points this out in his posts.

The future for job boards is in having structured data, sophisticated matching engines, delivering a great user experience (for recruiter and candidate), and enabling candates to be informed whether or not they are likely to ‘qualify’ for a job before they hit the submit button.

Alan

I’m waiting for competing employers to come together and create an alliance: their own job board where they invest, design, share and monopolize for their industry. Now there’s a way to shut out Monster.

Interesting you would say that Susan; my thoughts are that industry specific job boards with components of social networking and referral thrown in will be the “Monster.com” killer. As for the difficulity of tracking jobs on multiple job boards, Jason Alba of Jibber Jobber has done a great job of creating a tool that helps with that. For the time being though, I think candidates are best served by have realtionships with a few great recruiters.

Interesting you would say that Susan; my thoughts are that industry specific job boards with components of social networking and referral thrown in will be the “Monster.com” killer. As for the difficulity of tracking jobs on multiple job boards, Jason Alba of Jibber Jobber has done a great job of creating a tool that helps with that. For the time being though, I think candidates are best served by have realtionships with a few great recruiters.

I completely agree with you on your comments about online job searching. Since I predominantly speak to college students I hear this complaint all the time. Most students do not enjoy looking for jobs online but they know that is one of the most popular recruiting methods for employers.

Justin

If Steve thinks that consumers are going to spend 30+ minutes trudging through multiple choice questions, I don’t think he’s being realistic. Instead, how can we in the online employment space do a better job of intuiting what job seekers want? Our challenge is to show candidates jobs that truly matter them based on information about themselves and their interests that they are already sharing with us. Rather than force job seekers to do things our way, we need to introduce services that deliver them valuable information with minimal effort. In short: keep it simple.

This is an interesting conversation and one that the recruiting blogosphere discusses all of the time.

Here is my 2 cents

http://www.recruiting.com/job_.....o_the_fees

So how many recruiters like me are growing less and less interested in sites which focus too much on resume databases? My concern about the Market 10 model is how few passive candidates are willing to fill out a lengthly questionnaire. Most smart folks are wary of posting their resume just anywhere.

This is why I lean toward the aggregator sites like Indeed and SimplyHired. For networking I like LinkedIn much better because it isn’t just job specific, I can dig out some more passive candidates.

An eHarmony model for the recruiting trade? Nope. I just don’t see that happening EVER. And believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about it.

Here are four reasons why:

I. Companies often don’t know what they want the new employee to do — and therefore, they don’t know how to identify the talent they need. It’s is the client-side of the problem I outline in this recent post. Earlier this year I handled a VP-level search for a catalog retailer who changed the job spec three times before they hired my candidate. I owe the six previous candidates some holiday whisky for helping the client figure out what they wanted. Try as I might, there just doesn’t seem to be any correcting this problem — especially where politically charged, committee based hiring is involved.

II. Many jobs have no defined skill set — and therefore are nearly impossible to “taxonimize.” Everyone has used a pull-down menu of states in an email form. That menu is called a taxonomy. What Mr. Poland wants to see is a taxonomy of job attributes that can be electronically matched with a corresponding taxonomy of candidate skills. Certainly, for CPAs and the like, this may be possible. But in many jobs that involve emerging technologies, or emerging uses of existing technologies, this just isn’t possible. And it simply would be unwanted in jobs that involve proprietary processes or technologies.

III. People are terrified to specialize — and therefore will refuse to commit to one set definition of what they do professionally at the exclusion of everything else. Singles on eHarmony are unlikely to transition from one member classification to another (for example, “SBJF” to “SBJM”) — and they embrace rigid classifications of who they are.

This is the total opposite of what job seekers want, and they will reject any attempt to rigidly classify their skills for fear that it may limit their options. For example, I have spoken with more than one legal or accounting marketer who thinks they are qualified to run a major online retail store. People should stick to their knitting. But they don’t — and they will gamely resist filling out an online profile such as the one Mr. Poland envisions.

IV. All candidates are liars. We are all delusional to some degree. Most men think they are good looking, for example. Given human nature, the oldest joke in the executive search business is that “You are only perfect twice in your life: at birth and on your resume.” To the extent that candidates can game the form or keyword-load their online bios, they will — rendering the entire method suspect, and therefore useless. And any attempt for a future jobsite (ie Google Base) to datamine the super rich surfing patterns of its users to find out “who they really are” would be met with howls of protest from the likes of the ACLU.

Make sense?

Harry, you have hit upon some excellent points. All of these are valid problems but…..

An eHarmony model for the recruiting trade?…..

On the surface it looks daunting, but slice it a little and it looks very possible. I am not saying it will be perfect in all cases, but I am talking percentages here, if we can do it for 80-90% of jobs and then the recruiter can concentrate on the remaining 10% and earn his/her commission. If it is vertical industry like technology, the problem becomes tractable.

1. Companies often don’t know what they want the new employee to do…….
No amount of technology can solve this problem. If you do not know what you are looking for, even google cannot help you, companies should know that.

II Many jobs have no defined skill set — and therefore are nearly impossible to “taxonimize.”………………….
Creation of Pre-defined taxonomies are resource intensive, but here instead of defining everything a-priori, we need to see what is being asked and what is in the resume. Instead of explicitly defining it, the system will infer from what is being asked and what is available. This implicit taxonomy will work and scale. Again we need to do it vertical by vertical (tech, pharma, biotech etc..) or by a horizontal like (HR, recruiting, marketing, sales etc)

III People are terrified to specialize —…………………
Exactly.. Ask them to explicitly classify themselves, most people think they are Bill Gates, or atleast think they can do his job. Other than getting information regarding their preference like where they want to work (location), salary expectation, legal status. The rest of it can be gleaned from a resume (assuming it is accurate).
There is technology out there that can classify people by role. The skill sets, certification etc can be implicit and available from a resume. Using this information and being able to understand what is being asked in a job, it is possible to e-harmonize recruiting and job hunting automatically.

IV. All candidates are liars. We are all delusional to some degree……
Technology can take care of this. The problem today is that you use simple keyword or two to find a person. Its easy to game the system based on this, but a more detailed requirement can never by gamed, because the candidate will never know what is going to be asked as nothing is explicitly defined. Also technology should go away from term frequency to identify the best guys.

Now for my credibility!
You may be wondering what the @#$*, I am talking about. I am a co-founder of http://www.staffitnow.com, a sourcing solution for employers and a job match engine for job seekers. We have developed a matching technology that is eharmonizing sourcing, recruiting and job hunting today. The technology is in advanced beta and would like you guys to try it out and comment on it.
Match technology has to use domain specific information built over (implicitly and explicitly) and hence http://www.staffitnow.com is focusing on the technology market, for a start. There is no lengthy forms to fill or explicit classification.

Feel free to get in touch with me for more details.