Job Sites & Job Specs – Jobseeker's Banes
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
I am eagerly and assiduously looking for a contract.
I have about seventy job sites bookmarked – individual recruiters, consolidators & what I think are merely some site-scrapers. Some are quite good – I quite like CWjobs and Indeed – but whilst others are generally OK, there are some real clunkers out there: I am a contractor, I only want to know about Contract opportuntities, but you would be surprised how often the search interface is badly designed. If the option to search by job-type is present at all it's usually at least two-clicks away, sometimes more (find the "search options" link, click that, unclick "Permanent, unclick "Both" and check "Contract", for example).
[I am actually "registered" on many of these sites, yet even when I am logged in none seems to take note of the fact that in my profile I have said I am only interested in Contracts]
Fortunately however, with a small selection of job sites with decent coverage and decent interfaces one can get at a large number of prospects... and then the fun begins. The job title always comes first, that at least helps one narrow down the possibilities (keyword search on titles only, for instance); then comes the description or long list of "responsibilities" (which aren't really "responsibilties" at all, they're tasks which become responsibilities by virtue of the fact that you would be responsible for doing the things you are requiried to do.)
Then, finally – though sometimes they're towards, but not actually at, the bottom of the advertisement – one finds the lists of Mandatory, Essential, Required, or merely Desirable skills and experiences. This is where, having carefully worked through some HR lifer's tedious overview of some exciting opportunity, mentally checking what the employer would like done against what one can do, one finds the foreseeable but unforeseen requirement that "the candidate must have a minimum of 5+ years experience of naked unicycling."
In the absence of a genuinely semantic web it is not possible to screen out the roles for which one is totally unqualified because one is limited to merely including or excluding certain words or phrases, and there are far too many possible ways of expressing either the desirability or actual necessity of unclothedunicycling experience, let aline allowing for the possibility that the employer might perhaps be interested in those who would be "willing to undergo a clothesless one-wheeled cycling proficiency test with a view to determing up-front training needs."
There is also, unfortunately, no job category "Doer of Stuff", so those, such as yours truly who not only do Stuff but do it very, very well, find great difficulty in identifying suitable opportunities and have to wade through reams of Other Stuff in search of nuggets.
Sometimes I wonder who designs job websites and whether they, or the site operators, have ever tried to use their own systems. Come to that, I wonder sometimes whether...
Sigh... I could go on, but I have job-sites to peruse...
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