How Good Job Search Websites are
The dot com crash that bankrupted so many promising businesses never the less gave us an insight into what the web could be come. Uses that hadn't even been conceived previously were shown to be viable, workable, and worthwhile. However, there have been and continue to be roadblocks to that success.
At the beginning of the Internet boom, many websites did their hiring through the Internet rather than the more traditional walk-in application process. This gave rise to the thought that a site could be built with the exclusive purpose of matching workers to available jobs.
At first, these new job search sites were shaky and inefficient. For them to work, they required three things; businesses to post job listings, people to search the listings, and the personnel to work behind the scenes to make the two come together. While this may sound simple enough, it really wasn't.
In order to get the businesses and job seekers together, both had to first know about the service. Advertising is very expensive, so at first, these sites struggled.
In the years that have passed since the early period, many of the problems have been worked out, and advertising revenues have gradually been generated to allow the sites to get the word out about their existence. Most are no longer struggling. However, now there is another problem that is different than before, but remarkably similar in some ways. Now that there are many job search websites, how do you get businesses to post to a particular site?
The more time and effort a business spends at a particular task, the more money they are expending for that task. For many businesses, it just didn't make sense to take the time to post a job listing in every job search site they could find or had heard about. This problem continues today.
The most common way business approaches it is by posting a job in one or two sites, then waiting to see the results. If posting on site abc.com produces no results at all, but xyz.com places one worker, the second site is considered better by the business.
There is a problem with this. There can be a huge number of factors that can lead to no response to a job listing, and many of them have little to do with the job search site. The economic situation in a given area, the time of year, and even the way the business presented the position can all play very large roles, yet none of them have a connection to the job search site.
Because of this, job search websites are not very efficient, particularly for the job seeker who must use several if they want the best results they can get. It is unlikely that this will change anytime soon, until a standardized data base can be developed for all businesses to use, which can then be cross searched by job search websites. Then only the differences in the search capabilities of those sites will change, while the job market information will remain the same and will be available to everyone.
