The Best Job Search Engine

Searching for appropriate job postings is like searching for a needle in a pile of steel shavings. All the obvious ways to find the needle won't work. Specialized job search engines purport to help find appropriate postings for job seekers. Generally, search engines measure success by the number of results returned. In my experiences the results are largely not good matches for the individual.

Job search engines have some serious challenges:

• Job descriptions and requirements do not have standard formats and vocabulary.
• Job titles are different across companies and industries for comparable skills and functions.
• Industry is key for some job functions and totally irrelevant for others. (For example, do you really care if your payroll expert has construction experience, or are you satisfied that they have payroll experience working with salaried, hourly, and seasonal employees?)

Success for the job seeker is finding jobs that match their particular skills and interests regardless of the challenges the search engines present. Based on my ability to do that with the search engines the best search engines are:

1. Dice.com - Dice has three strengths that made it outstanding during my job search:
   
   
   • A checkbox to restrict the search to job title only
   • The ability to quickly restrict to a region
   • The ability to filter out old jobs
   
   These two strengths let me zero in quickly on a half dozen jobs that I was qualified for and interested in. I may have missed jobs that would have been acceptable, but the jobs I was looking at were always dead on. This is much better than wading through 60 or 70 "matches" that weren't even close, to find one might be close.
   
   I also had a much higher percentage of interviews stemming from postings in Dice than in other job boards/search engines.
   
2. USAjobs.gov, Governmentjobs.com, Virginia Jobs - the government websites have two things to recommend them:
   
   
   • Relevant jobs appeared at the top of the list
   • It is easy in all of them to restrict the region and government agency
   
   The government websites still returned too many irrelevant results and sometimes it is difficult to separate the jobs that are restricted to internal people only.

I'm still looking for a job engine that will let you eliminate jobs that require a security clearance by the level and type of clearance. I'm also still looking for standardized job titles, or some way to quickly distinguish between to different jobs that have the same title for example,"business analyst" - a business analyst seems to be either someone with accounting knowledge who determines the health of the business, or someone who writes requirements for software based on a businesses needs and requests. Few people could do both. I would also like to see job search engines drop the notion of "industry". Most jobs are industry independent.

So, next time I'm looking for a job, I'll pass on most search engines. I'll use the few that work for me. I will sill check specialized job lists. 

Change, Repent, or Progress?

I have a problem with the word "evolution". The way it is being used in the popular science press is a bit disconcerting. It can be used to mean "change", "progress", "adaption", or in the worst cases "God" or "Providence". It can be fun to take an author's words and start substituting potential synonyms. However, this doesn't tell us what the author intended.

Here is the proposal - the popular press stops using the word "evolution" and all of its derivatives like "evolve" and "evolutionary". Instead, I challenge authors to use the word they mean. Substitute progress, adapt, change, or repent. Choose the word that makes the most sense.

Day 100!

William did it! 100 days straight playing the violin. And he had a great recital today as well! Not bad for someone who just turned 8... Woohoo!

Social Recruiting

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.
Find me a find, catch me a catch.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book
And make me a perfect match. (Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof)

There is a new way to find employees - social recruiting. The basic idea is an employer would interact with a community of potential employees to see how/ if their skills/personality would match the corporate culture. This would give visibility to an individuals professional life and provide a more complete picture than the regular three or four hand picked references.

This sounds like information overload - too much. Already we have an environment where it is not unusual for an organization to take 8 to 12 weeks to find and recruit an employee, and that is just for collecting resumes and interviewing. If you are required - like public institutions, to complete a background investigation and verify education it can take considerably longer. For example, I am just now hearing back from institutions that posted positions in June that they are starting the interview process.

Of course, there is a group of people social recruiting really works for - recruiters. A recruiter can use a social website like LinkedIn or Facebook to find people - especially people who may not be currently looking for a job. It is very clear why recruiters would like to connect to as many people as possible through social networks. This is especially important for LinkedIn users because the site limits your searches to three degrees of contact - you can see the people you know, the people they know, and the people who know someone you know.  For recruiters, adding more people - even people with the wrong skill set or industry - adds all of those people's colleagues and contacts.

This raises a dilemma for the individual - are you connecting to the right set of recruiters? Are you going for find a job offer that is right for you? Or are you just going to get offers?

100 Days

It's day 88. William has not missed an evening of practicing in 88 days. He decided he wanted to play for 100 days - if he doesn't break his streak, he will make complete day 100 on December 1. It takes a lot to get into the habit of doing something for 100 days - especially something that takes effort. 100 days, wow.

Why Companies Can't Innovate

Why nations fail : the origins of power, prosperity and poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson should be required reading for most corporate managers. I could see a sequel applying the same contingency theory of history to corporations - Why companies can't innovate.

Acemoglu and Robinson's book is very readable and makes a very strong case that countries are not poor because of location, resources, or cultural heritage, but rather are poor as a legacy of the political an economic institutions they inherited. If these institutions are designed to extract wealth to enrich a small group of people at the expense of the rest of society, the society will be extremely poor and there is a good probability it will remain poor or become poor without radical change. Societies with inclusive institutions that allow mobility and the rise of new interest groups will innovate and there is a good probability the society will experience sustained economic growth.

Companies have many of the same challenges to innovation - if a company's business model is designed to maximize profits in its existing businesses, there is going to be a lot of institutional resistance to any changes that might threaten those businesses. If a company's business model is designed to include the decisions of as many people as practical, I suspect it is much more likely to innovate and be able to react to a changing environment.

And of course, because the economy is an open system there is always a third option - buy your innovative competitor and make his innovation yours.

Why nations fail : the origins of power, prosperity and poverty

Improving Job Search Engines

Most job search engines use keyword searching. Because of this choice by job sites, search results are often meaningless. Usually this occurs because the search engine:

• Searches keywords in all parts of the job posting
• Uses unspecified boolean logic
• Offers filters that are not meaningful to the target users - job-seekers

Each of these could be easily remedied without making major changes to the sites or their search engines:

• There is no reason to not have an advanced search which allows the searcher to direct keywords to specific parts of a job posting - and no reason to not require job postings to have a well-defined structure. You should be able to specify search words for requirements, description, and job title.
• Allow users to specify phrase searching
• Clearly explain the default logic for multiple word searches - getting more results is less desirable than getting good results
• Allow users to specify the search logic in an advanced search - enough people understand set theory to use AND, OR, NOT; there are another large group that could correctly select the same logic when presented as "search for all of these terms", "search for any of these terms", "exclude results containing these terms".
• Add meaningful filters - date posted, closing date and location are meaningful. Industry is not. I would like to see the following: 
• If there is a place for job applicants to enter a security clearance - then include a filter in the search that allows users to exclude jobs that require security clearances above their level
• If there is a place for job applicants to enter skill tags - then include a filter in the search for skills that allows users to select jobs that match identified skills

Job sites could also ask employers to use standard job titles. It is not uncommon for a job seeker to need to search multiple job titles to find the right job function. An "analyst" or "researcher" may have the exact same job, but the titles are different. Variation in job titles becomes even more enigmatic when you consider most salary comparisons are based on job titles. It the job title doesn't match comparable jobs it is not clear what a fair market salary is. Or even if someone is qualified to fulfill the position.  And that can't be good for either the job seeker or the employer.