Tech Crunch stream on job boards et al

Steve Poland on Techcruch started a conversation last week around the topic that 'job hunting online still stinks (my word, not his).

As you may not get to my comment (number 45 in the list), here is my reply.

"This is a very interesting stream, with most bashing job boards (too many jobs, not enough jobs, too many candidates, not enough candidates), promoting networking (Love to know where the 85% and 70% data quoted by Micha comes from), aggregator job boards (because job seekers are lazy - i.e. it is too much work to look at all of the company career sites), etc etc.

Yes, looking for a job is often harder work than working. Yes, looking for the right candidate is hard work. There is no ’silver bullet’ or one size fits all solution. All recruitment is about blended strategies, getting the medium and messages right for your business.

Networking tools (LinkedIn, Jobster et al) can help to manage the relationships and data about individuals. Job boards get the job out to many more individuals across geographic and time lines. Print is still valuable in certain sectors or job types. Search is necessary for ’sensitive’ or time critical roles.

We seem to miss the point often enough in recruitment that we generally start with two documents completely ill-suited to the task: the CV/Resume and the job spec. Neither is in a structured data format, which means that the potential for ‘matching’ accurately is unlikely happen. Marc points this out in his posts.

The future for job boards is in having structured data, sophisticated matching engines, delivering a great user experience (for recruiter and candidate), and enabling candates to be informed whether or not they are likely to ‘qualify’ for a job before they hit the submit button."

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, ERE, jobster, online matching

Comments

[Stephen Jones]

Hi

I guess as a job-board owner I am in the minority here, but not all of us are fly-by-night types. My humble website http://www.accjobs.com has been online (and profitable) for 5+ years, so I guess we're doing a couple of things right ...

Regards

Steve Jones
http://www.accjobs.com

[Alex Sakota]

very interesting point in comments, about structure of resume/cv...what is problem to keep resume/cv in XML file? you could search inside every node: by primary school or search by job position from/to particular year

[Jeff Tokarz]

Alan - the final paragraph of your post speaks volumes, "The future for job boards is in having structured data, sophisticated matching engines, delivering a great user experience (for recruiter and candidate), and enabling candates to be informed whether or not they are likely to ‘qualify’ for a job before they hit the submit button.", and was overdue.

Legacy job boards and job search engines are, at present, their own worst enemy. Conducting an online job search is like trying to find an available parking space in New York City - next to impossible.

Take notice job boards, job search engines, etc., job seekers are migrating to and using job search tools that deliver promised results. They want access to exceedingly relevant matching job leads - not mediocre, irrelevant job leads.

Exceptional job search results = more qualified candidate responses.

[Alan Whitford]

HR-XML will help in the ultimate transfer of data between all of the data repositories such as job boards (much easier with the structured data approach described above), ATS systems and the HRIS systems. There will be continued efforts to develop standardised CVS - an effort that I believe is doomed to failure as there is no one 'training' the millions of job seekers on how to write a structured CV. (other than industry specific initiatives such as The Skillsmarket in the UK for IT staff)

Great comments Alan. What you describe basically tells me that there is no easy solution, and lots of current solutions will be around for a LONG time.

I'm wondering, after reviewing your profile, how you see progress in HR-XML help improve any particular area?