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What Do You Want in a Job Website?
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?"
Jobs not recruiters..
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Most sites ask you the geographic areas you want to work in, but the recruiters who troll the sites don't listen. I want a job site where when I check "Sacramento" I don't get called for jobs in San Jose or "the Bay Area". That's NOT Sacramento folks, learn to read! While you're at it, how about banning recruiters who aren't from the area they're hiring for? I hate it when some schmoe recruiter in North Carolina is trying to fill a job in California...
Mmmm. Free market research...
More jobs. If you aren't searching nationally (which most people aren't) or leaving the fields blank ; there aren't more than one or two matches. Even these are mostly fake jobs listed from headhunters and placement agencies looking to expand their pool of workers. I'd also like to see less competition between the job websites. I don't like checking 15 websites for a job every day.
PS: For Canadian bums like me that are looking for a job, check this site out.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
I'm sick of seeing "open" or "market" for salary ranges.
I'm sick of seeing job postings that want someone to be experts in Cisco, Windows administration, Exchange, AD, Linux, Solaris, Oracle, SAP, and perl scripting experts for $60k.
I'm sick of seeing job postings with technology contradictions, including requiring more years of experience with a technology than it's been around.
I'm sick of seeing job postings for jobs that don't exist -- find a way to penalize recruiters who post non-existant jobs for resume collection.
I'm sick of seeing job postings which misclassify jobs entirely. Find standardized ways of describing a position, like using SAGE's job descriptions -- http://www.sage.org/pubs/8_jobs/core.mm
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
... I really don't use job sites, but I've poked around a bit.
1) ban recruiters
2) manditory salary ranges
3) must include company name so I can do research
4) use a good set of standard tags (travel, COBOL, PMI, etc)
5) list when you're deciding to award the job
Places like Monster only allow you to pick metropolitan areas. I want to be able to stick in MY location and see all jobs that fit my criteria within a 45 minute commute.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
As in, things for a bright college student to do, without needing 10 years of experience in everything. I mean, I get the point, but I *know* that I'm capable of doing a few things here and there.
Monster seems to feel that a solution to the problem already exists -- you can turn off the ability for others to send you unsolicited offers. But I want people to be able to offer me jobs, provided it's a job that I'd have some chance of being interested in. What really needs to exist is an enhanced set of filters for the unsolicited offers. I should be able to filter people who don't provide a salary range, for example, or don't meet a minimum salary determined by me. I should be able to include in my summary conditions for that contact. Or filter by industry. Or job category. Or any of a dozen other factors that I should be able to control.
Then you need a feedback mechanism to rate the quality of the unsolicited offers -- both on a community level, perhaps like eBay ratings, and back to the job board, perhaps to notify them when someone has falsified information to evade filters.
Of course, the problem with all this is that the job posters pay the bills. Profitable job sites are going to limit the employers as little as possible so long as they can maintain some illusion of job seeker-focus.
Job sites need some means to prevent recruiters simply doing keyword searches through resumes, but never reading past your phone number.
Nothing is more annoying than some C-average H.R. major who didn't even bother to look at your name until the phone was ringing, say "So tell me what it is you do!"
I do not want such morons to "schedule some face time" with me, nor do I want them to "touch base" to "keep you up to speed."
-CR
"So is the BSD licence even more 'free' (than GPLv2)? Yes. Unquestionably." --Linus Torvalds (TinyURL.com/2vugzl)
No I do NOT want to work from home giving away free satilite dishes. No I am NOT interested in medical billing nor do I think it is an exciting career. Yet both of these, along with many others like them, come up in a search for information technology jobs on Monster.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
I'll tell you what I'm fscking sick of. Every single book/pamphlet/magazine/website/list of job seeking suggestions threatens a job seeker with death if they don't format everything perfectly, spell everything perfectly, and make your cover letter and resume look like a shining diamond. Yet the job postings I see on every single job site, whether it's craigslist or somewhere really formal, are pieces of shit.
They're spelled incorrectly, they have horrible grammar. There are inconsistencies with the technology (four years of something that has only existed for 2). They're inconsistent with how they want you to contact them: the company wants a direct email, the job site wants you to go through their website, and the recruiter wants you to go through them.
I swear to god, companies need to get their shit together if they expect the same from us. When I'm looking for a job, that's really number one in my book, is the company even focused enough to create a coherent job post. Because there are plenty that are shit, and I'm just going to look right past you.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
1. I want to know if it's a recruiter or a direct job. I do not mind recruiters, but often they are just "fishing". And I do not want to waste my time.
... And a position for 12.35 an hour in a call center will just be wasting all of our times. Or a "guru" position at 130k .. You will get much closer applications if you place the low and high of what a position will pay. I don't like "negotiating" my job the way I would a used car. Although it seems that some recruiters and used car salespeople come from the same school.
.. You did it to your self.
2. I want to know where the position is. I don't want to waist my time with "Seattle area" When I live on the East side and a job in Tacoma would be a 2 hour commute each way.
3 I want to know how much they expect to pay for a position. I make over 60k a year in IT
The point is that if you low ball my salary sure you might be able to make more in your commission. But When I get the offer I was expecting from a competitor well
This is exactly what happened to me in my last 2 jobs. I accepted a "lowball" offer to get me out of the position I was in. After 4 months (and no promised review after 90 days that was supposed to come with the salary I should have gotten the whole time). I was recruited over to a great position I now have. I do not expect to be leaving any time soon.
Well it's just my opinion.
Good one. I know some guys with ~3 years of experience, or so, with .net 2.0, but they wrote the damned thing, so they hardly count...
Also, can we start interviewing people based on their freakin' TALENT rather than some arbitrary laundry list of buzzwords? As an employer, do you want to hire the guy that just happened to read the "Ruby for Dummies" book last week or do you want to hire the guy who can become an expert in any language he doesn't yet know within a matter of weeks?
It just seems that the applicants I get are rarely suited for the position they're applying for. They seem to just fire resumes out of a shotgun. They don't have any experience in the specific field (database driven websites), or even in the general technologies (when to use a left join in SQL). At this point in the web's history, is it really too much to expect people who already know this stuff? And for them to be easy people to work with? The catches are just too few and far between.
.sig for heaven's sake!
It sounds from the other posts here that the would-be-employees have similar compaints from the other side. Too much noise, not enough signal. Recruiters annoy me too. What can these job sites do about it? Hell if I know. I'm too busy trying to hire people!
I've been relegated to including a link to my company's tech jobs page in my slashdot
Cheers.
There's nothing I hate more than having to go through some recruiter (who often turns out to be a scumbag). What I want in a jobsite is an actual connection between job seekers and employers, with no middlemen getting in the way. The recruiters are a problem in more ways than I can count.
AccountKiller
Is that job sites are not designed to get employers and employee's together. Instead they are designed to keep them appart until one or both parties (depending on the site) cough up the necessary dough to "see" a little of what the other offers. More effort has gone into hiding one from the other than has gone into enabling one to see the other.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I know a few recruiter/head hunters have found me using some technology that searches the web for resumes. (Hint - Set up a web page and put your resume there.) I even got spammed by one. He had his introduction letter automated. It was even automated for replies I believe. After I received the same letter three times, I complained and they stopped coming.
A better technology than all the online job boards would be one that searches the internet for your resume. Maybe this would be a google resume search. If you have a useful website, your resume would probably be higher in the rankings. I don't know -- it's a start. In the mean time, I've just started applying to everything that's even remotely related to my skills.
If you ban recruiters, you will lose out on some top jobs. So the thing to do is to go to SBC/Yahoo!, IBM, the federal government in all its departments, CitiGroup (or whatever it's called now), and all the other fortune 50-500 companies, tell them to re-hire their HR departments, and do their own damned work screening tech recruits, rather than hiring firms that specialize in having half a clue. Yeah. Right.
Which brings me to "firms that specialize in having half a clue" -- I worked for a recruiting firm that DID have half a clue. Their CTO worked Cisco equipment on a high scale (was a former contractor for the firm), the CEO was a database programmer, and on & on. When they read a job description and can do half of what they're looking for, much less hire for it, it's one thing.
Other places are entirely clueless. The recruiters have been to their GED classes and know how to power on a computer and that's about it. The jobs rolling across their desk are as indecipherable to them as sanskrit texts are to me. My partner has been getting calls -- he's an RF engineer. The job requirements are alphabet soup to the recruiters -- they are more-than-clueless. They wouldn't know RF from a refrigerator.
So the problem isn't to ban recruiters, lest you ban great jobs. The problem is banning clueless recruiters.
How about a recruiting firm rating system? Allow job applicants to rate recruiters, and post the recruiter ratings and comments. People sick of clueless recruiters can filter them out.
---- I'm out of your mind!
but for it to be meaningful, I need to evaluate skills first. (There are 20+ levels for 6 titles)
Congrats, I had planned to just browse this topic, laughing self-debasingly, until you stumbled across my peeve about job websites...
You don't have "20+ levels for 6 titles". You have A job you need filled. One level. One title. One job, one job posting. If you really do have all 20 slots open, submit 20 postings.
Or rather, you should. My peeve? Employers who "fish" the job sites, by posting truly outrageous (my favorite ever, 5+ years of Java... in 1998!) or just mind-bogglingly vague ("we want a self-driven team player to actualize the potential of our Information Technology assets") "job" descriptions. I can only presume they do this just to see if anyone will bite, not with any real intention of offering respondants a job.
So... When a job site asks who, what, where, when, and how much - ANSWER THEM! Your company has a name, and you know that name; You know what you need a body to do; You know where you need that body to do it (and NONE of the companies listing telecommuting positions mean it - HR uses that as an alias for either "flex-time" or a 4/1 week); You know when you want the body to show up, and whether you need them for six weeks or permanantly; And perhaps one of the most obnoxious, jerk-us-all-around omissions nearly every employer makes, you know HOW MUCH you want to pay for that body. Don't play games, just give -A- number (not even a range). We may negotiate around that number at the interview, but you DO have a number in mind.
I want a "rating" system. I want to be able to see what my peers said about the person and the company. Think EBay. He wants a job, he's probably been to interviews. What can the interviewer say about him? Is his resume valid? Or is it padded? Or a fabrication?
.net experience. Especially not someone under 25. According to some requirements, you should've started to code (professional) no later than at 10 years of age. But still managed to make your MD in CS.
Same the other way 'round. Is the job offered really the job offered? Or did you get a "sorry, this position is filled but..." reply for a crappy job? Was it really a recruiter? And if so, is the recruiter legit or one of those that try to shovel people around for money?
Ratings is what I want!
And what I'd also love to see is realistic expectiations. You simply WILL NOT find someone with 10+ years of professional
Also, most employees are more than willing to learn. Yes, there are very few ABAP proggers with 5+ years of experience, and those that exist will charge you a fortune. I bet my rear that you will find a lot more people willing to sign any adhesion contracts binding them to you for years as long as you're willing to train them. For a LOT less than training them costs you.
But of course, all companies wait 'til the very last moment before hiring someone. I have not ONCE been hired when the roof wasn't on fire already. It's NOT really what I consider a dream job when you get like 2 days to familiarize yourself with a few megs of source before you're pressed into the schedule.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I have to say that in the larger (and even midsized) organizations I've worked in - that is bullshit. Many jobs I have been in involve teams and if one person can't rack, wire, move Sun E450 servers (those mofo's are heavy) or whatever - there are plenty of shitty tasks to go around. Great, you can't rack servers, you get to answer the phone. Just because you can't rack servers shouldn't mean you can't be part of the team. Teams work out all kinds of trade off for certain types of work one person or another may not want or be able to do, if and when they are allowed - most teams would kill for someone who took on phone duties in trade for other stuff
Half the time I think they put that stuff on there to prevent handicapped people from applying.
Those HR and management assholes should have to explain to everyone how the outsourced admin and support teams are any better at those tasks.
As a person who writes software for recruiters I can tell you it's not the quality of candidates (at least in IT) that are the problem. It's that the requirements used for narrowing down candidates are mostly meaningless. A person who has been programming in 10 different languages for 10 years will not be placed in a Java job if Java was not in that list of ten. Despite the fact they could become proficcient within a week, probably less time than it will take to acclimatise to the new environment. The situation is probably the same for most other specialised industries.
/. favourite, the patent office. To be able to place a person in a job/accept a patent requires far more domain knowledge than an individual who's job is not in that domain would have.
The problem is the same as that of that
I've been hunting for a job a few years ago. And I was quite stunned when I saw the expectations. Years and years of experience, degrees, certificates and so on. At first, I didn't apply. I thought they wouldn't take me anyway, since I couldn't fulfill all those requirements (a few, a lot, almost all, but never all).
Until I realized that this doesn't matter at all. People just slap a ton of requirements on a page and actually it seems they expect that someone who applies can't even come close to them. Instead, I get the impression the requirements are used as a way to intimidate the applicant and try to convince him that a lower salary is quite acceptable, since he didn't really meet the requirements.
And as long as this prevails, you will get sub-par qualified people applying, simply because they think it doesn't matter anyway. When you expect the impossible, people will assume that you don't really expect anything at all and will apply.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't be ridiculous, it is the fault of the search engine (designer). Specifically, why are people still relying on free text search? It indicates a lack of knowledge of the marketplace. A long time ago people invented relational database systems, which let you have tables with fields. Fields can hold different values and you can put validation on those values. Hmm, how about a table called prog_lang with an row for each programming language in demand in the market place? Let's have a couple of columns, lang_id and lang_text. My bet is that if you added a row with lang_id 1 and lang_text c, then you added another row with lang_id 2 and lang_text c++, you might just be able to distinguish between C and C++. Hey, then you might be able to populate a web search form with check boxes and radio buttons rather than an empty text input box expecting stupid C AND NOT (VB OR C++) strings.... and if a job comes in requiring a programming language which isn't listed, ADD A ROW!
FFS.
Of course the reason no-one does this is because it seems like too much effort. It's much easier, apparently, just to leave the skills matching to the initial phone call. For instance, I was called by a recruiter this morning who spent 30 minutes asking stupid questions 99% of which were covered in the CV (resume for yanks) I sent last night and to which she was responding. I had to bite my lip from saying "Did you even READ my CV? Do you actually know anything about the skills required in this job?" because she hadn't and she didn't. Yet she is in a position of power over my next pay cheque!! And she tried to make me feel that I might not be up to scratch for the job. She didn't even know what was involved in doing the job! That makes me angry.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Unintuitive at best. You're filling a job, not hiring a broad skillset. You have a particular need and a known set of job-seeker-attributes. Candidates who vastly overfill that set are likely to become bored and dissatisfied. Candidates who match your needs-set closely should be given a clue as to how you value that set. Saves everyone, from the seeker to the recruiter or HR to the hiring manager a lot of effort and wasted time if this most basic datapoint is established.
I'm very interested in how this relates to your actual needs in hiring. I have some experience in this. I was always aware of the salary range we'd offer. We most often did not put this in advertisments though. Bluntly, it was generally perceived that we might over-pay and it was (their) effort to minimize up-front costs.
I ran across a recruiter once that specifically said he needed to have resumes in Microsoft Word format because he only uses Microsoft Word to "process" them (which as you say, probably means he removes identifying info). I managed to track this guy down and gave him a phone call and he seemed friendly enough. Then I spilled the beans on him. I told him that his precious Microsoft Word would actually work with resumes in ASCII text format, as well as resumes in HTML format, and would allow him to edit them and store them in Word format right on his hard drive. He had no idea that could be done. I spent the next 20 minutes telling him how to do it and was quite surprised that my HTML format resume looked just about like a Word format resume when loaded in Word. He thought I was some Word guru or something, but the fact is, I had by then accumulated perhaps no more than about 3 or 4 hours of time using Word (and all of that was at work, not at home). I'd bet a lot of the "please send resume in Word format, only" requests are based on this level of ignorance about the very tools they use every day.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So the problem isn't to ban recruiters, lest you ban great jobs. The problem is banning clueless recruiters.
I'm sure there are great recruiters out their. I've talked to some not so bad ones. I'm also sure there's some great used car salesmen out their (And actually, I've talked to some very honest ones). The problem is that the industry has a deservedly bad reputation. Trying to find the needle in the haystack is really quite a difficult problem. Even good recruiters are still middlemen, and represent yet another barrier to what you actually want. Essentially the problem is more endemic that just bad recruiters. If recruiters actually worked like real-estate agents, rather than fishermen trolling a lake they might be usefull. But as it stands they're all fishermen putting out bait (job postings) trying to catch a fish (job seekers) and sell them on the open market.
You say the cost of losing the recruiters is some great jobs. I'm willing to pay that cost as I only need ONE job, not several. In essence the signal might go down a bit, but the noise is going to get cut down by a factor of at least 10. That's a win, and I'll take that any day of the week.
AccountKiller