Different kind of job search
At Exponetic we have a number of recruitment consultant clients and are often developing job search type websites, and indeed there’s a large piece of recruitment functionality that we’re adding to a new site at the moment.
Alongside this, we’re also working on a new site to help business schools find people to fill their courses based on a slightly different way of searching i.e. rather than having the course information stored on the site, people add their details and wait for a course to find them.
So, I was intrigued by Watch 4 a Job which appears to be a blend of the two ideas. Although the site does allow you to search for a job the main selling points seems to be the ability to set up search criteria and let jobs that are added find you. The location-based search brings back fairly predictable results such as if you search for jobs in Somerset, although running a job search will only let you specify criteria for which jobs exist in the database which helps prevent completing a complex form and getting ‘no matches found’ back. It would have been good to be able to continue to filter from this page onwards, or possibly save a search. If I was halfway through looking for jobs in Birmingham I would like to be able to drill down from there but it doesn’t seem possible to do. Not too much of a problem when there aren’t a large number of jobs on the site but that may change.
The idea is that job searches are based more on fixed categories and less on keyword searches. I assume that jobs posted have to have exactly the same criteria filled out to make the matching work. I also get the feeling that location is one of the primary search criteria and they’re obviously going for a certain degree of search engine optimisation with keyword-heavy links like jobs in Gloucestershire making sure they contain lots of the word “jobs” as well as the location. Still, it’s a very competitive market so it may be difficult to build traffic based on search engine optimisation alone.
In common with some of the other projects we’ve been coming across lately there seems to be a theme of “matching buyers to sellers” to a lot of dotcom ideas, and this certainly fits that bill. I’m in two minds as to whether it adds much to the “vacancy alert” style functionality that other job sites have, but possibly by being explicit about it users will understand the intention of the service slightly more than the same functionality on a regular job site.
