Job Search: Is It Easier Now Than The Pre-Internet Days?

In the good old days, job searching meant opening the local newspaper and going through the classifieds and responding to them. Jobs were local, they were advertised locally and a job search was local. Newspapers were built on classifieds and job vacancies were the premium money making machine. It was simple, but not terribly efficient as the target pool it reached was local. Then the internet was developed and the world changed.

Internet began the democratization of information. Anybody could access any information, location did not matter. This helped build the online version of the classified sections. The current major job boards took root during this period (mid to late 1990's). They did not move away from the old classifieds business model, but now employers could reach a larger talent pool and not be restricted by geography. Job seekers could now access jobs from companies that they never knew existed. It was job searching nirvana, but no one insisted that there should be only one job board.

Capitalism dictated that there be as many job boards as companies are willing to support and this resulted in multiple big job boards each having its own clientèle. Job search means going to many major job boards and searching for jobs. This was not bad initially as there were only a handful of job boards.

Entre "allways follow the money" preneurs figured that it does not take much to roll out a job board as all of them used the same standard software. All that was needed was sales and marketing- sales to the employers and marketing to target job seekers. This resulted in the proliferation of job boards. To compete against the majors, they advertised their boards as "niche" and targeted a sub group of job seekers. The niches are so fine nowadays that I would not be surprised if there is a job board out there that is touting the fact that they can reach "men with yellow hats and yellow pants", a population of one. (People with kids know, I am alluding to the "Man" in Curious George.)

The half full view of this development is mass customization, the half empty view is fragmentation and cacophony. How can job seekers, unless they frequent the job sites, find them? What happens if they do not frequent these niche job boards. Job search just got a whole lot more complicated.

Job seeker's life turns for the worse with the advent of the "Web 2.0" world. The "web 2.0" world was rooted in mass customization and catered to the long tail of interests. A small group with shared interests could network, share, and create a community. Blogs sprouted and gained in popularity. Blogs attracted a small sub-section of the population, of loyal and dedicated readers. These sites were usually operated by one or a couple of people and were initially happy with advertising using Google adsense but they also got into the job advertising market as a specialized channel. Now a job seeker had to account for jobs posted on these blogs and community sites too. How many sites can a job seeker go to and search?

Enter the job aggregators & vertical search engines. They can be described as a mini-Google, but they index only jobs. They go to different sources, collect jobs, and make them searchable for job seekers. This can drastically simplify a job search as a job seeker has to only go to one site and technically be able to search all jobs posted anywhere. The problem the job aggregators chose to ignore was the core search and retrieval technology. They used the same keyword-based searching to retrieve the job results. This meant job seekers have to read each and every job to see if they are qualified for that position. Searching using boolean keyword in one site was filled with irrelevant results. Imagine the results if they searched an aggregator which typically had jobs from all the sources that is fit to be indexed.

This problem is more acute in technical fields like IT, engineering and sciences where positions are skill-oriented. In these fields, a person need to have a certain combination of skills to qualify for a job and keyword searching is woefully inadequate in disambiguating and contextualizing the job requirement as well as the job seekers qualification.

Some time back, I was listening to an ad from one of the major job boards that went like this: "Until the day comes when you can find your perfect job at the click of the button, use us to search for your job". I was amused because I was working on a technology that does exactly that. A one click match that gives the job seeker a perfect job, doesn't matter where it was posted, is the holy grail of job search. For this to work, a job seeker need to supply information more than keywords, a resume would be a good starting point. Just like a resume contains all the information for a recruiter to qualify or dis-qualify an applicant, the match technology should be able to qualify or disqualify a job based on a resume.

The critical requirements of such a match technology are: it should have access to all the jobs posted in corporate websites, job boards, blogs, groups, networking sites, etc. The technology should not require the job seeker to answer pages and pages of questions. The technology should then be able to comprehensively match the jobs to the person taking into account the job seeker's preference like location, salary, title, travel, etc.

This technology which is now available, can handle further segmentation of job advertising channels and can automatically intimate the job seeker through RSS feeds or email. This technology is especially critical for automatic intimation through email or RSS feeds as the number of jobs that is passed on to the job seeker is limited and hence the improved relevance and very accurate.