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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...
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
A job that pays me to tastes coffee and doughnuts with a good wage, benefits and an early retirement plan.
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
Entry level position, must have 5 years experience in .net 2.0, 4 years in perl 6, ....
and so on for an absurd laundry list of arbitrary skils which tell me that the people hiring are either clueless or insane.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The job descrptions should include the reviews/comments from current employee/s (could be anonymous) who is/are working in the same position as the seeking title. That would clearly tell the aplicant what to expect or how many years to stick with the company. Forget about the description of jobs posted by original head hunter. they dont know the field work, nor the results of the job. just some lazy ass manager sends them requirements & headhunters add some bells & whistles & post on sites/newspapers. we need honest comments from current employees.
... 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.
I want the jobs to come to me.
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.
Hmmm. Have you considered a career in Law Enforcement?
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.
Jobs, of course. Categorized and cross-indexed in any which way you could think of, so it's straightforward to narrow down to only those posts that actually are of interest. You want job listings for network management in east London, with at least such and such base salary, weekends and nights acceptable, at a small or medium-sized firm at least two years old, then that's what you should get. And it should optionally match your profile to explude listings that are not a fit for you (not enough experience, no bus drivers' licence, etc.).
The trick to a good service is to make the listings reliable and complete. If a company posts hugely inflated requirements (must have 200+ years experience coding Java) in the hope of attracting top people, you're going to miss valid openings since they'd be filtered (you only have 180 years on your resume). Likewise, no employer is happy wading through exaggerated, not-quite-lying resumes to find people that actually are qualified. Figure out how to make it _easy_ to be honest. Make all listings anonymous, would perhaps help? Not sure about that.
Also, make all listing open-ended. Don't have a set of checkboxes for what languages you know (or seek), for example - no matter how many you list, you will miss some, and people will wnat to qualify their answer more than a yes/no check. Let people write in the language, and a one-line comment about their ability (or needed ability). Make it open-ended, then do text searching for matching. Make any graded description, like skill level, very vivid and concrete. An abstract 1-5 scale can and does mean very different things, but if you make each point descriptive, with an example, it's easier to find a common level. Oh, and three levels is almost always sufficient for ability descriptions. Any finer graduation will be a matter for the full-size CV and interviews.
Ideally, there should be a comments section on each and every company, and each and every job seeker a'la Amazon, so you can evaluate the general desireability asa workplace or workmate. But of course, job seekers and small firms will not get enough comments to constitute a valid sample, and I'd imagine there'd be more than a few legal headaches providing a comments section as well.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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)
1. Their main revenue source these days seems to be from student loan refinance companies.
2. They allow bogus "professional training" companies to masquerade as employers.
3. They don't make it clear how much information others can learn about you (e.g., can a complete stranger find your name, address, phone number, etc.? Can your current employer see that you recently posted your resume?)
A good job website would work like this. Job seekers can post one or two resumes online for free. Employers can search all resumes for free. They can contact job seekers for a small fee. Job seekers should be able to choose which employers can see their contact info. Any "employer" offering job seekers anything other than a real job or internship should not be allowed to use the site. Predatory student loan refinancing companies should be completely excluded from the site.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
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
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
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.
Indeed.com is a good step in the right direction. (disclaimer: I work there)
Indeed currently has 3.4 million jobs from the last 30 days. It lets you search jobs from thousands of sites in one place. And it has a cool job trends tool.
Oh yea, and it has a site for Canadian jobs, too.
I routinely get job offers for Southern California and the East Coast. Although I explicitly state everywhere else I'm looking for something in Silicon Valley/Santa Clara County. It got to the point that I would cut off a recruiter before they get into the sales pitch to ask them where first before wasting time for either one of us.
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...
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
I counter with "valid canidates."
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.
What state is that in?
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.
As a recruiter I'm surprised that people are so negative against us. I know there are some scumbags out there, but from the large amount of responses in post I'd guess that most of the "scumbag" recruiters are hanging out on the jobsites. Your job is a huge part of your life - many of us spend more time in our jobs than with our families. Personally, I think that people who go about finding a wife/ husband online are inviting danger and heartbreak. Finding a job is pretty much just as an important life decision as finding a partner, so I would n't recommed going online. If you choose to go the online way, you are inviting the same risks. Most good recruiters also feel the same way about the jobsites - the quality of the candidates on there isn't good. Quality candidates don't use them - because they don't need to. Finding a good recruiter isn't that difficult, once you have - build a relationship. Ask friends and colleagues who they used - most good recruiters get most of the ir business from referalls and thus don't need to use job sites. Look up a good firm that is local to you. I think smaller boutique firms often give better service. When you meet with the recruiter ask the important questions. How long have you worked with this company? How many people have you placed in this company? Who do you interact with in the company - a good recruiter sends the resume straight to line managers. You should get an idea if they know what they are doing. A good recruiter may not be able to answer technical questions correctly, but they should be able to open doors for you in to their clients.
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.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
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.
As a contractor working alot with recruiters, I found the best way is to keep track of who is good, and who is bogus. For this, I setup (shameless plug) Recruiter-Rater, as a way to find and rate tehcnical recruiters. Mostly I've done the posting, but other users have started to contribute their experiences. There really isn't another way to find out which gigs are SPAM, and which are valid, until you do some research, or compare with other people.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
You have a point that a degree, even from an Ivy League institution, does not automatically confer common sense, an ability to solve problems in the real world in real time, or even a guarantee that the person knows how to think well.
It is also sadly the case that many schools and so-called professors are a complete waste of time (and that is being generous).
I also think that most HR people and recruiters suck -- they don't really understand the real requirements, and just match lists of requirements and capabilities (and usually badly at that).
I have an Ivy degree, and was self taught in the computing field, so I know the value of both. In fact, I feel that being self-taught can be a distinct advantage, because one's thinking might not be as constrained as it would be with a formal education.
Yet, as an employer (running software companies), I always started my basic requirements for all positions, even front-office support type positions, with a requirement for a four-year degree or commensurate experience. I have occasionally used the "commensurate experience" exception, and was well rewarded with excellent employees, but the hurdle was high.
Requiring a degree gave me two things as an employer. First, I knew that the applicant had passed the admissions filter and had demonstrated some ability to think and complete work over a period of years. Yes, it is VERY imperfect, but it is something. Second, an education, especially a liberal arts education which we strongly preferred, can dramatically extend your ability to think in different ways; the student should have been systematically exposed to many more modes of thinking than are encountered in ordinary life. All too often this means nothing, and I must still evaluate each case, but my odds are much improved over the pool of the un-degreed.
The next thing I do with all applicants is to read their writing and resumes as a work product unto itself. How well are they doing the task at hand (of applying for a job)?
You, unfortunately, would have already failed this screening, even with a degree. Your third sentence jumped out and hit me over the head with the fact that you don't know the difference between possessive and plural, or between "there" and "their", and these are repeated errors. It is not merely being a 'grammar-nazi'. How you communicate matters -- do you expect the computer or someone else to debug your code? You are asking them to do it with your writing.
I would have to ask two questions: First, if you are this careless or uneducated with your primary language of communication, how careful or educated will you be with a computer language? Second, I will have to worry about every memo leaving your desk making my organization look questionable? Every good thinker I know uses English as a primary tool, does it well, and immediately recognizes the difference in those that do and do not.
Moreover, I would need to see more than just 'I'm so much better than Jack and Joe with their degrees'. I see good enthusiasm and 'get it done' attitude, but I'd need to see more evidence of precision, rigor and forethought in your work (not that it doesn't exist, but it is not evident here).
If you want to do well being hired by others, I'd suggest getting a good degree, and being absolutely ruthless with your instructors. Accept nothing less than clear, rigorous instruction. Seek out the instructors others call tough. You are paying for an education -- demand the best. Because, frankly, the degree itself isn't worth crap -- there are plenty of degreed people I wouldn't hire to sweep the floors.
Alternatively, start your own company. That way, you can hire yourself without a degree, and the people that hire you (your customers) will be more focused on what you can do for them now than what you did in the past. But again, be rigorous -- ask the question "would you hire yourself?", and do whatever it takes to answer that question "Yes" before you start.
Good luck in whatever path you choose.