Thursday, April 24, 2008

New job site idea

So i'm looking for a job again, and most jobs suck, and most job sites still suck.

Everything I give out my email address I start getting spammed by more people - so why not provide job seekers with their very own 'job seeker' email address, so they can turn it on and off whenever they want? They can choose to keep their old address, or they can choose to get a new one whenever they want. All contact between the job seeker and potential employers is done through this email address, so the job seeker's personal email address is not compromised.

Companies like Emurse showed great promise, I thought, but then they seemed to just fade away. I wonder if I can convince them to make a go of it on their own, again - with my help, maybe. :)

Seriously -- that Monster and Dice and Taleo and these types of sites actually still exist is just an incredible failure of the market.

Most job sites are stuck in the stone age, and things are actually getting much worse for everyone involved. It's an incredibly inefficient process for myriad reasons, but I believe that technology can help make the process more enjoyable (read: less dehumanizing) for everyone.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fade away, eh? ;) I'd be curious to know why you'd think that.

From our stand point, we're consistently up in every single metric that we track month over month (and this year over last, obviously). We're also profitable, which is more than most web2.0 companies can say.

We are in the middle of radio silence on our blog, but its for good reason and should end fairly soon (we're a small company, and blogging takes a great deal of time). Big news coming out relatively shortly once we work through some NDA details as well.

Regarding your post, I think it'd be really helpful for a lot of people -- it could work very similarly to the way craigslist handles it. We've explored both temporary e-mails and temporary phone numbers as possible features at some point. IMHO though, both are more for the 20% than the 80% of users, and once we rolled out our contact request system (which gives email anonymity / choice to the jobseeker), the requests for temp. emails started to subside a bit.

Should be an interesting cycle for all the job hunting sites though. Recession may slow down hiring, but it sure does speed up on the job seeker side.

Best,

Alex Rudloff
Emurse.com

SiouxGeonz said...

Go for it.

I'm looking for brainstorming sessions on the possibilities ... I think it's time for a little punctuation in the equilibrium.

Peter said...

Hey Alex - I don't say 'fade away' to diss - that's just my impression.

And sometimes 'fade away' means 'not grow in functionality in any way meaningful to me'.

It's obvious that y'all have added _something_ over the past whatever amount of time since I last used y'all, but it's nothing that i can see that actually helps me at all. It's possible i'm missing something, but if y'all offer a resume download in 10 new file formats and French, it's still not what I need.

What I need, and what others have needed, for years now, is a replacement for the myriad monstrosities like Monster and their minions - dice, etc. That emurse works for people and is growing and profitable is all well and good - more power to y'all, but it's not solving most of my problems - so I need to find something that does. Whether that comes from emurse or someone else is up to y'all.

Let's talk about a specific need in the marketplace - the ability to share your resume information with companies - without having to re-type your life story into each proprietary outsourced application that companies use to discard the resumes they receive. It's not necessarily an easy problem to solve, but there's no reason to believe it can't be solved.

So, I'll definitely be excited to see what y'all have cookin.

:)