tomhudson's Journal: Job hunting sucks

But everyone already knew that :-)

Not much has changed with the way the Internet handles job hunting ... the big sites look like it's the same workflow and the same methods carried over fromt he last century.

I don't want to have to sit there and see a bunch of listings, see a title that looks interesting, click on it, read a bunch more verbiage to get to the point!

I want to see a bunch of offers at the same time. I want to see them grouped by location, because I don't want to do the daily beast commute. I want to be able to post my "looking for ..." on the same darned page! Ditto with a business card blub if I want to do some freelancing.

I want something that would work like this.

Why? Because the people doing the hiring are probably saying the same thing - they're not going to click hundreds of times. And with everyone stuffing their history with buzz words, searches are ... bleh! Putting the job offers right in there with the ads from people looking for work is a natural - but rent-seekers won't do that because it disintermediates them. (This is just a fancy way of saying that it would result in many headhunters having to look elsewhere for work).

It also means less pingeon-holing. Someone might see your personal business card, click on the title, read the profile page and say "you know, I'm going to give her a call" even though they wouldn't have found you with a search because you were targeting a different job.

A month ago I made a mock-up. It sucked. So I made another one. It sucked - but it sucked a bit less. So now I've got one that's maybe only 75% sucky ...

Anyway, you can see the preliminary concept, and it actually is usable now. Once I people start sending their ads resumes, etc (they're free), I'll run the scripts to make clean, and take it from there.

And if there's some demand, maybe I'll stick a similar one on trolltalk for the tech crowd (but that one will obviously allow you to pick a country and state/province). If anyone wants, I just need a list of countries, states, and cities in a flat file so my perl scripts can generate the code.

Obviously the tech card deck would have a few extra items for coders - a portfolio preview card, for example, or a code/project card.

Yes it does

[RM6f9]

Which is why an ever-growing percentage of the population are building businesses of our own - will your site also relegate us to nowhere-ville, or segregate us to some dusty back-corner of the site?

Re:

[tomhudson]

You should go there and see - click here for the english version [femmesenaffaires.com] and mouse over the folders. Then look at the demo data that's currently in the site - those who are self-employed or otherwise in business (pink cards) can also use the looking for work (yellow) cards - their posts are shown along with everyone else.

After all, we're ALL in business, whether we work for a boss or ourselves.

Re:

[RM6f9]

So, I'd be listing under Pink and Blue, and reading the Yellows - sounds fair. (Yes, my company is doing business in Canada too!)

Re:

[tomhudson]

You could also post a green card - while they're titled "resume", they really mean "elevator pitch", and link back to a full-page resume (click on any card's title in the demo).

A job market is supposed to be a market, and true markets bring everything together in a convenient format, unlike today's market where people try to make themselves relevant by keeping the buyers and sellers and seekers and traders compartmentalized.

You want an XML error?

[jawtheshark]

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: jar:file:///usr/lib/firefox-3.6.6/chrome/toolkit.jar!/content/global/netError.xhtml
Line Number 60, Column 12: &loadError.label;
-----------^

Hey, build such a site. I promise I'll be user number 2 (just after you)...

Not that I'm looking for a job, I'm happy with my job in the porn industry, thank you very much.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Next time, I'll read the whole thing before posting :-) Doesn't wikipedia have a country list?

Re:

[tomhudson]

They do, and I did grab it at one time in the past - but obviously, I need more than just the countries list. Every country has second-level entities (states, provinces, territories), and they have 3rd-level entities (regions) and 4th-level entities (cities, districts, boroughs). Some simple math shows that even 200 countries x 10 states x 5 regions x 100 cities is a LOT of work (half a million entries).

Fortunately, like the cylons, I have a plan for dealing with that :-)

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Every country has second-level entities

Nah, not mine... :-P Don't over-generalize. I sometimes already have a hard time enough to fill in forms that expect these sub-entities ;-)

Re:

[tomhudson]

Sure you do - http://www.liechtenstein.li/en/pdf-fl-multimedia-information-liechtenstein-druck.pdf [liechtenstein.li]

They're called communities. url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein>

The principality of Liechtenstein is divided into 11 communes called Gemeinden (singular Gemeinde). The Gemeinden mostly consist only of a single town or village. Five of them (Eschen, Gamprin, Mauren, Ruggell, and Schellenberg) fall within the electoral district Unterland (the lower county), and the remainder (Balzers, Planken, Sc

Re:

[jawtheshark]

I don't live in Liechtenstein, you insensitive clod! Yes, technically we've got cantons and communities... but forget those, they are used by no-one. I bet it is not different in Liechtenstein.

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks for looking. BTW ... there's no xml on the site - and there never will be.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Then why did it give that error? Now it just said "unable to resolve hostname" (Epiphany 2.30.2 /Ubuntu 10.04) On Firefox, it is "Server not found".

Don't mind testing ;-P

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Works now, apparently.

Re:

[tomhudson]

That's always good to know - did you have any other tabs open at the time, because right now, the files being served up are plain vanilla - I'm only going to add the dhtml and xhr magic once I'm satisfied with the physical layout.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Basically only slashdot... I think. The XML error was on my home machine this morning. (Also Ubuntu/Firefox)