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G’damn spamming bastards destroy the quality of the online job hunting resources.

(yeah this a necro, but this story shows up in google as of 2009… so fair game)

What a load of BS, networking you say ? What are you selling Amway ? Networking doesn’t work for 99.9999% of the population, so know that’s not true.

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.

That’s rubbish, what are you selling. Sounds like you read that from an MLM book.

Bottom line, most people these days are finding jobs via internet after they sift through the 1000’s of fake ads of course.

Our idea for roundpegs.com marries a lot of the ideas that work in the online dating model. In reality, finding a job and developing a career at a company is very similar to finding a date and a building a relationship with someone you meet on a dating…

nice post…

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about Austin-based startup Itzbig. Founded by recruiting industry veterans Jim Hammock and Hank Stringer, the company hopes to bring some 21st century ideas to the tried and true recruiting business. The company has…

For more thoughts on this stop by and visit Jobmatchbox.com

To most of my recruiter, researcher, resourcer friends get to work. My pot has finally boiled over on the use of job boards. They are one of many, many tools to use. You are just hoping and waiting for one…

You don’t sound crazy. I have thought and thought and thought about how an eHarmony-type solution can be developed for recruiting. Everything you say is 100% correct. I took the Birkmann personality profiler 6 years ago and it was astoundingly accurate. Scary.

But as “Anon 2″ put it, “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.”

So good luck to both of us; you the software developer and me the recruiter. We both have a tough slog ahead of us. May the best man win.

Harry

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.

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?