What Do You Want in a Job Website? 642
antifoidulus asks: "After reading some complaints about monster.com from both the perspectives of job seekers and employers it struck me as how, even in 2006, most job sites are incredibly poor at what they do. So I ask my fellow Slashdot readers, both job seekers and employers, what do you really want in a jobs web site? What features are totally lacking in the current crop? Also, what aspects of the current systems do you love/hate?"
Blunt reviews from current employees... (Score:5, Interesting)
RSS feeds (Score:5, Interesting)
I already subscribe to a couple of job sites that offer feeds and have had great results using them. I wouldn't even consider manually searching for jobs at this point.
No Military Listings and No recruiters. (Score:3, Interesting)
The TOS of any good job site should make it clear to recruiters that they can only post for jobs that they can fill, not generic jobs just to get your resume. Also there needs to be a way to filter recruiters for agencies out.
Also don't make me sign up for the website to look at jobs or receive email notifications.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:At Least Make the Recruiters Do Their Freak'n J (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I spoke with that person recently. I emailed a resume in both pdf and opendocument format to an HR manager recently. I also included a link to my online, html format resume. Guess what the reply email that I recieved 3 weeks later said? "I couldn't open your resume, can you send it in word?". Shit!
Pet Peeves... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more annoying is trying to explain to some recruiters why I'm not going to drop my current contract job to run over for an interview in the middle of the day. I'm making money now. Why should I blow off money on the table for an interview that might turn into a job that pays. Some recruiters just don't get this.
I love the recruiters for Microsoft. At one time, I was considered for five different positions over a two month period that never panned out for one reason or another. Seems like some Microsoft managers need a prade of potential cadidates to be considered at the same time before they decide on anything else. So frustrating...
jobbank.com is listening (Score:1, Interesting)
When we decided to create a job site business we found that many of the sites out there currently were not just excessively expensive, but difficult to use. We were hoping to provide an alternative.
As a developer there, it is a challenge to keep making the site better, but I will try to make sure the feedback here goes right back into the work we are doing.
Re:To be blunt... (Score:4, Interesting)
To all the people that say jobs... (Score:5, Interesting)
My mid-sized company uses monster. We have open positions that represent 10% of our workforce. We are in dire need for these positions to be filled.
The boolean mentality does not work for most "good" jobs. Sure, people like the system to pick out the one "perfect" job/canidate, and start on Monday. It doesn't work that way. Typically, a company has minimum requirements and maximum pay in mind, and they want the system to offer the best people within those constraints for further screening.
A better system would mimic a headhunter more than a classified ad, with an incentive for making the match rather than making the marketplace.
Sure, you don't want to move, but under what conditions would you reconsider? The salary might be lower, but the fringe benefits could make up for it. You might be hired for a posting below your skills, with the opportunity to advance quickly.
You really want the killer app? Create a shared database for recruiters like what exists for real-estate. Require screened canidates and offers.
"Dating Service" perception (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Geographic Preferences Honored by Recruiters (Score:2, Interesting)
- Lots of jobs
- Website is targetted to only one geographic area
- Only tech-related positions
- Link directly to the job postings on corporate websites
- Filled/New positions updated daily
You can see an example for Vancouver here: http://www.techjobsvancouver.com/ [techjobsvancouver.com] 1,297 tech jobs in Vancouver as I type this. As I said, there are websites for other cities as well. I'll have to read through all these posts to see how we can improve.Ditch the alphabet soup. (Score:3, Interesting)
My other beef with job sites is the lack of standardization for the application process. The job site should be able to collect the relevant information and pass it on to the hiring manager. When I click "apply now" I should not be taken to some other e-HR site to enter all my information AGAIN and submit my resume AGAIN. Just make it work!
Lastly, the blatantly bogus listings for the work-from-home scams or ads with insufficient details (like, say, the actual employer). Please.
Nathan
what I want in a job-site (Score:2, Interesting)
2)in-depth local coverage : the reason I belong to seven sites is because in my field and at my level, some of the best opportunities never get listed with the national level sites. There are good, industry or region specific websites that list jobs that Monster and the like will never see.
3) BAN the use of "company confidential" in want ads. I want to know who I am applying to. At bare minimum, professional standards suggest that I direct a personalized letter to the HR head honco, highlighting things not covered in the resume, or showing how my skills directly apply to that firm. Obviously, I can't do that if I have no friggin' clue who I am dealing with now can I?
4) Every company must have a blurb/profile of some kind listed on the site in order to post jobs.
5) Potential employees should be allowed to post feedback on these companies. (There is a tech recruiter in Oshawa, Ont. Canada that I would love to post a few harsh words about) E-bay and Amazon manage to do OK with that idea.
6) use industry standardized job descriptions. I believe that both Canadian and American federal gov'ts keep lists of jobs with thumbnail descriptions for just such a reason. Granted; in the tech sector, new jobs and descriptions often pop up very quickly, faster than a gov't agency can keep up with. However, it would be a starting point. For new descriptions, allow companies and registered potential employees to maintain a wiki of job related terms and job descriptions.
7) Allow the use of an *accurate*, relational boolean keyword search. I for one am tired of searching using the key terms network, administration and server and getting a handful of techie jobs buried in a pile of accounting, managerial and other jobs simply because *one* of my words happened to appear. Worse yet, NONE of my words appear anywhere in the ad, yet it gets included in the results anyway. (I'm looking at YOU jobshark.ca) My ex-girlfriends angelfire personal homepage has a Google search in it, why can't yours?
8) actually have a human being *read* support e-mails, not just have a 'bot skim through and send me the form letter du jour based on a few keywords, directing me to the FAQ's/self help pages (I'm *still* looking at you Jobshark!).
9) don't limit resumes to two pages, cover letters to 800 chars. These conventions are based on real people having to wade through real paper. Lets face the fact that the vast majority of companies are using 'bots to skim through the slew of applications a nation-wide posting can generate. These 'bots are comparing my resume to a stored meta-resume. If I get enough checkmarks, my resume gets passed on to a human. Given the wide range of degrees, certifications and so on, it makes sense to let me do a traditional one or two page resume, and then append a couple more pages stuffed full of keywords for the 'bots to flag. If websites can do it to boost their chances, why can't I?
I'll list a RCA or CCNA on the human pages and do the long forms : Red Hat Certified Administrator and Cisco Certified Network Administrator : on the 'bot pages. For that matter, let me post my resume as a
10) while I am dreaming here, gimmie an RSS feed option instead of e-mailed alerts. It would be slightly more useful to me than the e-mails, and to my mind way cooler besides.
Don't bother (Score:3, Interesting)
The really good jobs are handed out by executives talking to executives. People who say, over lunch/dinner/golf something like "I'm looking for a NNN, do you know anybody?". If you can be whomever is named 10 seconds after such a question, you are looking at the dream job. At this point, being convenient and "good enough" so that they don't have to worry about it, is very good reason to hire you. Once they have to go thru the hassle of reading 27,000 resumes and interviewing 47 people, whoever they hire is going to start off on the wrong foot, simply because of the hassles involved in hiring.
Make sure to be damned good at what you do, and be just as good about letting everybody around you know that, without coming off like a prick or a primadonna. Make sure that, when you're looking for work or contracts, that those who know how good you are know that. And, leave your name/business cards everywhere you can.
That referral is golden - when you get it, you'll end up with customers/employers who don't mind paying you well, and offer you smiles, thanks, and appreciation you while they hand you your check.
But, once you get to the job site, there's nothing special about you, and it's soooo much more difficult to find the cream!
Re:As an actual employer... (Score:3, Interesting)
I applied with you guys when you moved to Vegas a little while ago, even though I already had a gig, so I wasn't shotgunning. I was one of the last three people interviewed, in fact. After I talked systems, enhancements to them, and overall engineering on/for your site for about an hour with big happy smiles from your people all around, and then they tossed me because I couldn't write obfuscated Perl off the top of my head.
Of course, they only told me about it after I dogged them for a week and a half. Nice.
Don't whine about people not being out there. No one is a perfect match, don't expect everyone to have the same exact strengths as the rest of your guys.
this is not a fault of the search engine (Score:3, Interesting)
Until we get search engines that can determine meaning from context we are stuck as long as people keep naming their products in stupid ways.
We may joke about apple iXXX everything but at least it is easy to search for. MS is especially evil since it seems unable to name its products uniquely.
Oh and that is what I want in a job website. A search system that gets around it. After all the system knows the context, it is searching through jobs listings. Shouldn't be too hard to get people to list required skills in such a way that even current search technology can easily list only those that apply.
Of course that would only help if jobs didn't just list every skill they ever heard off.
Re:As an actual employer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow this is getting old. "Everyone is a mouth-breathing moron. There are no qualified people upon this green spinning Earth." It's getting really REALLY old. Most companies ignore qualified people as a matter of policy. The rest they just lay off as fast as they can fill out the paperwork.
"We want brilliant self-starters with gleaming degrees and years upon years of high-level go-getter achievements. Once they are hired we expect them to become compliant slaves who will never question, never speak, never miss a chance to work a double-shift and never complain they are being paid about 1/3 what they are worth. When they are fired, we want them to blame themselves, acquire more skills, emerge from bankruptcy, slap on a spearmint smile, straighten their tie and start over at half pay."
Now let's all sing the company song.
Re:Cluefullness for job requirements (Score:2, Interesting)
The weird thing is that the jobs with C# + Oracle + C++ + VB + PHP + COBOL + IDMS + MUMPS + QuickBasic + SSADM + UML + ..... are often some of the worst paying jobs.
The best paying people focus on 4 or 5 core competencies (normally language/database/environment/analysis).
Awh, you are making me cry (Score:3, Interesting)
Because that excludes people like me who are entirely self-taught. I know what you are talking about. I have more then once had to help people with diploma's coming out of there ears with the most basic stuff. Just last week I worked on a volunteer project that a couple of students had done where they had not done a single thing about security (putting get variables unchecked into an sql query, login over http). They stopped with the project because they had finished their internship and are now studiying for their exams.
They will probably pass. Despite the fact that their programming SUCKED!
I have seen this in commercial projects as well. That I a person who only learned by experimenting and reading knows more then the uni grad but is constantly slammed down in reviews for the lack of diploma's.
Last job I even lost because of it. I was the unofficial head of the web development department but when my manager left (head of the web business unit) it was decided to bring in someone new to be a proper IT manager. The guy had all the diploma's and could talk the talk but had no clue about how to actually run a website day to day. Yet I was supposed to work under him. I said thanks but no thanks. I am not going to earn less then a guy whose hand I am supposed to be holding. That wasn't the first time either.
Now don't get me wrong, I am no coding god. I just got a bit of common sense.
Sadly most bosses do not. I do not even respond anymore when a company asks for diploma X no matter how capable I might be of performing at that level.
Just ask for coding examples and look through them.
But hey it is easier to complain about employees then to question wether the problem perhaps lies with you. Of course I know where my own problem is. It is that I could not wait to get out of school and into real live.
Stop harrassing your recruiter!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Customizable CVs (Score:2, Interesting)
Check out OpenSkills (http://openskills.org/ [openskills.org]).
OpenSkills turns things around and is run by the people with the CVs. The resume model in the SkillsBase is quite sophisticated, and resumes can be exported as HR-XML.
OpenSkills is funded by it's subscribers. It is free to search the SkillsBase and there is no charge for working with people found in the SkillsBase.
It's free to get started, $20AUD to subscribe and an OpenPGP key signed by two current members is required for membership.
HTH,
BTW, I'm the current chairman of the OpenSkills board.
Radical Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's an idea I hit upon a while back that I think could / would work very well and solve all our problems. This idea is a little UK centric at the moment but it would work everywhere. If you find yourself out of work in the UK you can sign on for the jod seekers allowance (as long as you jump through all the right hoops etc etc yadda yadda). To do this you have to go to the Job Centre. One of the conditions of getting job seekers allowance is that you apply for a certain number of jobs and generally that you spend time looking for jobs at the Job Centre. The problem is that "Job Centre" is all but a dirty phrase in the UK and no "professional" will go near the place. This means that there are _no_ professional jobs listed ever. If you want a professional job you are stuck with scouring the papers and numerous bad jobs websites populated by head hunters. As we all know this takes an age and often means good jobs get missed. I would like to see a new law brought in that _all_ jobs _must_ be advertised in the Job Centre regardless of what the job entails. An employer is free to advertise the job elsewhere as well and do whatever they please it simply must be listed at the Job Centre. There are a number of reasons why I would completely support this legislation 1)it completely insane that we fund Job Centres throughout the country that are not servicing the needs of a huge portion of the population 2)it would give everyone a place where they can find a job 3)it would simplify fnding a job and hopefully as a result this would cut down the number of unemployed or at least the time people spend unemployed 4)it would probably have the side effect of removing many of the fly by night head hunters. I am interested to hear people thoughts on this idea both positive and negative. I might pass it on to our local MP as well even though I don't like the guy.
Well trained people don't grow on trees! (Score:2, Interesting)
A few years ago I was unemployed and desperately searching for a job. All I saw was advert after advert for jobs that required more skills than someone in my position (newly graduated) could possibly have. What was I meant to do? Naturally, I looked for the jobs that were the closest match and applied for them, whether or not I had all the 'required' skills.
If you employers are going to complain about the lack of suitably skilled people, you had better be taking on a few 'youngsters' for training. If you're so miserly that you won't train people, don't bloody expect them to train themselves! It's a matter of civic duty - if you don't "do you bit", the entire country's skill pool is going to decline.
Fortunately, I eventually got a job through a family contact and have since been developing code for an embedded control system.
Re:Geographic Preferences Honored by Recruiters (Score:2, Interesting)
I completely eliminated monster.com from my life over the follow pattern. I had a "job agent" that would send me email when a job showed up in Nevada that included the word "perl." Not that I am actively looking for a new job, but it's prudent to know what's going on.
Any number of recruiters will post their jobs in other states just to trigger job agent emails to people like me. I got an email about a job in "San Antonio, NV" that was posted by a guy who posted a job for San Antonio, FL, San Antonio, PA, and maybe a few other states.
I'd always politely complained to monster.com about this practice and got nowhere. I emailed the recruiter giving him my opinion that he was not really helping himself. (He actually replied that his idea about geographic spamming must be working right, because I had read his job ad!)
I always got very generic responses from monster.com about the problem, and this incident broke the camel's back. I deleted my job agents, turned all my email preferences completely off. Thanks for nothing, monster.com.
Word format resumes required? (Score:2, Interesting)
Resumes must be submitted in MS Word format?
Granted, this requirement is almost always from some scum recruiter that can't handle more than 2 applications, mail & MS Word, (and should thus be an identifying clue). I *wish* the bloody recruiters would accept PDF, or even an HTML page which I can present myself better with; folks hiring me are hiring for a documentation specialist after all.
Yeah, I know. They want to remove identifying information. Again, refer to that above paragraph. Acquire a PDF, html, or God forbid a text editor.
Then of course it is nice when the recruiters that found me via a *search* actually read the context of the written resume to see if the yield was valid. Saves everyone time and energy, no?
Then there's the nothing bigger than ~150K upload rule.
Of course those that require completing a custom form w/ job history, etc.; as opposed to simply uploading the source-content resume file, well they just suck. Yes, I'm talking about you Monsterboard!
Why can't these recruiters/ HR sites 'search' various formats; and place the burden of 'quality' on the candidate? By allowing the candiate the possibility to single-source, the candidate might stand a chance in doing so.
Finally, I'd much prefer to see an aggregate that fed directly into the corporate HR sites themselves; bypassing those bloody agents. As it stands now, the best bet is to deal directly with the multitude of HR sites directly (bypassing both the job sites *and* agents); albeit the resourceful geek will find a way to automate this task.
Re:Radical Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
You think that's bad wait till you hear this... (it's worth pointing out that I've had very limited interations with the JSA people as I've fortunately been in work pretty much full time - the stories I have about them are from my partner who for one reason or another has had to sign on a couple of times).
Anyway, on with the story, my partner has a PhD in chemistry so when she went down to claim JSA last year it wasn't with much hope of actually finding a job through the JC. I was just starting a business so we were both out of work and the few quid a week from JSA would have been really useful. Well, it was basically a disaster from word go. She was unable to claim JSA because she had been out of work for 1 month in the seemingly arbitary 18 months assesment period. The fact that she had been paying a great deal of NI for the 4 years previous to that made no odds - that one month stopped her from drawing any benifit at all. The only thing that she could claim was having the JC pay the minimum NI contributions. We couldn't believe it. The one time we really needed a little help from the state that we had been paying money into hand over fist for years and they completely let us down.
From there it went from bad to laughable. They were totally unprepared for anyone that had qualifications and the assessor was next to useless. Dispite actually telling my partner that they wouldn't have any jobs suitable she require my partner to look through the all the job adverts. At one point she suggested my partner take one of a number of jobs that require no qualifications. The funniest part was the second visit. On the first one my partner was given a booklet to record what jobs she applied for. She took back a complete booklet on the second visit and asked for another. Apparently the assessors jaw hit the ground - the booklet was supposed to last for at least two months and most people never fill one. Dispite it being clear that my parner was really looking hard for a job they still made her waste one morning every two weeks going to the job centre.
Re:Geographic Preferences Honored by Recruiters (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem, I suspect, is that the site was set up by somebody born and reaised in New England where the states are much smaller and has never been to the rest of the country.
Even that does not excuse such an error. The roads in this part of the country tend to be narrower, windier, twistier. Yes, we have Interstate highways up here in the northeast, but they are retrofits, and there are a lot of places that ar just flat out inconvenient to get to.
Besides that, the states are still big enough not to be a sufficient division. I live in the western end of the Capital District of New York State (basically the Capital District is Albany, Schenectady and Rensselaer counties), more specifically, in the city of Schenectady. A job in Albany, Rensselaer, Troy, Saratoga Springs, Amsterdam, any of these would be good. A job in Lee, Massachusetts or Mahcnester, Vermont would be pushing it, but survivable.
Within that specification, I would want to select Vermont, New York and Massachusetts as my job search area. Under that, I'm likely to get a gazillion job postings from Boston and Cambridge, New York City, Poughkeepsie, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Rutland, etc, all of which are waaaay beyond a reasonable commute.
(An exception might be made for a job from NYC or Poughkeepsie, as I understand that people commute by bus or train to get to jobs there from here. I've never tried this myself.)
So you see, it is not just a California problem.
Re:this is not a fault of the search engine (Score:3, Interesting)
There are several reasons I really hope this gets off the ground. It is private, in that your resume is not out there for your current employer to see, (unless you want it to be). It is localized. It should theoretically be easier to screen out recruiters, because companies and employee both can have long standing accounts with measured activity and so there could be a social aspect to it.
Anyways, this site does know the difference between c and c++, and when it hears that you know it, it asks you what you know about it, what types of development environments you used, certifications you have in that area, etc. It is a very clever setup. I wish I'd thought of it.
Re:To be blunt... (Score:2, Interesting)
Lately, I've been using http://jobs.rubynow.com/ [rubynow.com] for any job searching. Of course, only works for Ruby programmers, is full of startup companies with more ideas than business sense, and it seems to be down at the moment, but it's simple, obscure (ie, recruiter-free), and very focussed on one job market.
Help us create a better job search engine! (Score:2, Interesting)