idiotprogrammer writes “While the major job sites like
href=”http://www.monster.com”>Monster.com command hefty fees from employers who want to list their ads, there are relatively few free public forums for employers to list ads and for job seekers to learn about them. Google allows access to employment newsgroups, but these have been spammed so much to be very virtually useless….
In the age of cost-free web publishing, shouldn’t a better cost-free job-posting system have emerged by now? It is becoming harder and harder for job seekers to apply directly to the companies themselves (ask yourself: how many “job postings” are just recruiters trolling for resumes?). Gosh, in the good old days, job seekers who mailed resumes could feel relatively confident that a real live person would actually throw the resume away. But nowadays, who knows? And do queries to resume databases still produce meaningful results for employers? (Hint: an hr person who types in C++, unix, java or asp as keywords is NOT going to narrow the field much!)”
by jchotz on Thursday February 14, @10:20PM EST (#1)
(User #222 Info)
I like the idea, I’m just not sure how you’d separate the “wheat” from the “chaff”. Would you only allow direct suppliers and direct consumers? Don’t the recruiters play a valid role of some sort?
Cost free? (Score:1)
by Jake96 on Friday February 15, @12:17AM EST (#2)
(User #231 Info) http://www.aint-here.org
In the age of cost-free web publishing, shouldn’t a better cost-free job-posting system have emerged by now?
But it’s not really cost-free to publish on the web, is it? I think that’s precisely why nobody has tackled a large, searchable, bells-and-whistles, free job-posting site. When you buy lines in the classifieds, you pay a fee to cover the printer’s costs for paper, ink, machinery, labor, etc. Monster.com must similarly charge to cover bandwidth, servers, labor, etc.
$0.02 deposited.
Probably because of headhunter spam (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15, @01:34AM EST (#3)
I think if you were to create a fully free job hunting web site, you would be overwhelmed with recruiter spam, or just fake job postings used to collect resumes for some other purpose. I’m not saying that it’s not a bad idea(maybe a GeekAustin.org/jobs) but it would have to be moderated or something. I’d love a geek job web site, for geeks, run by geeks, with geek jobs, as opposed to “Requires 4 years of EJB experience, Oracle, DB/2, Informix, and PHP” or some nonsense.
I used to work for Dice… (Score:1)
by softwarejanitor (softwarejanitor@yahoo.com) on Friday February 15, @11:51AM EST (#4)
(User #61 Info) http://www.softwarejanitor.com
Which is a fairly big online job board. They have dozens of employees who do nothing all day but handholding with employers and jobseekers to make sure job postings and profiles/resumes get in right, and to try to keep the amount of spam and fluff (and outright abuse) is kept down. Even the publishing isn’t free, given the amount of bandwidth a site like Dice chews up (they have multiple OC3’s) and the amount of hardware it requires to handle their volume (they run load balanced clusters of rackmount SMP Alphas).
The problem with doing something free is you either aren’t going to get enough traffic to make much of a difference (and it isn’t easy to get over the hump where you get enough jobs posted to draw the jobseekers in, and enough jobseekers hitting the site to get employers and recruiters to post jobs), or you are going to get swamped, and you won’t have enough bandwidth, hardware or customer service to keep up.
I’ve seriously considered starting my own job site, as have some of my co-workers (many of whom also used to work at Dice), but we haven’t done it yet, primarily for the reasons of what it would take to get things off the ground.
eliminating the middle men (Score:1)
by idiotprogrammer on Friday February 15, @04:21PM EST (#5)
(User #235 Info)
I agree that the value that monster/dice/headhunter add is that they moderate/control access to the information. But monster is also expensive to employers and often doesn’t provide the information a job seeker needs most: what companies are actually out there. I wonder what percentage of job leads are advertised on monster, v. on the company’s web site v. never advertised at all.
Re:I used to work for Dice… (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16, @01:30AM EST (#6)
Wouldn’t a good way to limit your resource needs be to limit the job searches to Austin techies? I wonder how successful austinjobsearch.com or whatever it was they used to advertise on the radio all the time is. There is a really good Austin-focused web page, that lets you rate different Austin tech companies. I don’t remember the URL to that one either.
I thought about starting a college-oriented job web site my senior year of college (99), because I was so frustrated with how bad JobTrak was. Maybe it’s better now, but it was terrible then.
Re:I used to work for Dice… (Score:1
by softwarejanitor (softwarejanitor@yahoo.com) on Saturday February 16, @11:46AM EST (#7)
(User #61 Info) http://www.softwarejanitor.com
You are probably thinking of Mark Wells’ www.austinjobhunt.com site. Limiting to a specific geographic area will limit costs, but it also limits the number of job seekers and job listings. The hard thing to do is get the balance between those and the market penetration to a level that makes you viable without costs eating you up. There is a reason most job sites charge for job postings, although if you only wanted to break even instead of being highly profitable you could certainly charge a lot less than what the big guys do.
well, I’ve answered my own questions! (url) (Score:1)
by idiotprogrammer on Tuesday February 26, @03:53AM EST (#8)
(User #235 Info)
www.directemployers.com is a collection of big companies that sponsored public job posting site. Pretty awesome!
