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Hello, I'm Eric Shannon, raised in Chadds Ford, PA., I now live in Boulder, Colorado and my company LatPro Inc. is based in Weston, Florida...
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Who's got job search relevance?
Submitted by eric shannon on January 4, 2007 - 5:28pm.
From Bob Wilson's Search Engine Guide, comes this surprising gem on relevance:
Relevance … specifically job search relevance … and the lack thereof on most commercial job boards … is one of the reasons I blog. The technology exists to return more relevant job search results, yet the market does not seem to care. Why?
He points to Just-Posted.com as leading the way with job search relevancy. I'm sure Bob is right, we owe relevancy more attention! As for the reasons job boards are complacent, Bob lists:
- better search reduces page-views per user, and sites are measured by traffic metrics rather than customer outcomes;
- the less efficient the search process, the more advertisers are willing to spend to be heard above the noise;
- the most profitable player in the market … Monster … does not deliver superior search results; or perhaps,
- market participants … jobseekers, employers and recruiters … don’t care about search relevance.
I don't think any of these explain our own inattention. I'd say it's rather that the war is not yet won or lost on the battlefield of relevancy. For niche boards, it's a high-level refinement and most job board owners are busy dealing with survival issues like how to hire and manage a sales team, how to finance growth of the company, product pricing, etc.
But perhaps for both niche and big players, it's also about our DNA. Successful job boards grew because they were marketing oriented companies, not product engineering oriented companies. It's in our DNA to think about marketing first and the mouse trap second. The product focused companies made complex systems and went out of business. Well, that's my humble opinion anyway.
Chad Sowash | January 5, 2007 - 11:12am
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»san | January 5, 2007 - 6:49pm
It is really hard to talk about relevance when you still have companies sending hundreds of job postings in batch with bad or conflictive information, just because they are sending out jobs like a machine --without caring about the qualityof their ads.
And this is happening to ALL type of job boards: today I visited Career Builder, made a search as if I were a candidate that only has a high school degree and I got a bunch of jobs that were requiring BA or BS. Why is that? Because to make things easier they sent their jobs with education "not specified" and they include that in the requirements but not in the field that is in fact "filtering" education.
So we shouldn't blame the job boards for not using more the technology to improve their results, when the companies are not using even the ones available!
Now, from a candidate point of view, even when the concept of relevance is interesting, the relevance I got from Just-Posted is not what I would aim for. If I entered 3 keywords (i.e. marketing, advertising and internet) and I choose 50% relevance that means nothing to me. I don't know how the website is calculating that relevance so it is not meaningful for me, except if I entered 100%.
Much interesting would be to be able to enter 3 keywords and be able to tell the system that I am more interested in the ones that have "advertising and internet" then the ones that have "marketing and internet" but that I am not interested in the ones that have just "internet" by itself. That would be relevant to me --because I am the one telling the system exactly what I want.
But still, going back to my first point, any relevance would be lost if the companies posting are not doing a good work when posting. So, don't shoot the messenger!
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