Job Search Engine Guide

You Can’t Buy My Love

   

But you can buy a detailed report describing the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition. 

   

Interested in the testing methodology and detailed results for each round?  Curious why your site scored below your competitors?  Looking for specific usability and performance analysis that can help guide future development?  It’s all available to you in a format that uniquely compares your site to each of the tested sites in the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition.

   

If you follow the Job Search Engine Guide, you know that I refuse to accept advertising of any kind.  If I ever do, then I think you should question my objectivity.  But objective tests like the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition require considerable time; and one way to make this a sustainable evaluation process, providing guidance year after year, is to sell the detail-level findings to job sites as competitive intelligence.

   

Price?  $4,995 for a customized report for your site; or $9,995 for the report plus an onsite visit to discuss the findings and recommendations.

   

Let’s be clear though … at the end of the day, what I really want is your commitment to site improvement … the fee is simply a crude way to make sure that we’re both focused on the same goal.

   

Do you want to improve?

   

2007 Top Sites for Job Search – JobCentral Wins Round 3

   

Surprise, surprise … JobCentral jumps from next-to-last in round 2, to take first in round 3. 

   

Think of the 2007 Top Job Site Competition as a decathlon, where instead of testing speed, endurance, strength, and skill, we’re testing ad coverage, relevance and features in large markets and small.  It’s possible that a winner will emerge without winning a single event; but to do so will require the competitor to be free of weaknesses, finishing well in all events.  Still, we shouldn’t expect that the fastest sprinter will be the strongest in the shot put.

   

Rounds two and three were as different as a sprint and a marathon.  Whereas round two looked for ads in Boston, MA, a population center of about 4.5 million, round three looked for ads in Baker City, OR, population of 10,000.

   

As it turns out, government employment represents a more significant proportion of the economy in many smaller towns in the west … these towns are often county seats, and citizens expect access to government services regardless of population density.

   

So the job boards that don’t include government job ads for Baker City are missing a key sector; and this is a sector where JobCentral shines brightly.  With the closing of America’s Job Bank, JobCentral stepped forward to provide similar services, and they have successfully executed relationships with 30+ State government employment agencies … Oregon included.

   

   

Additional surprises in round three? 

    

Monster placed next to last, paying a price for trying to limit comparison between other job sites – for example, instead of offering the typical filters of one week and 25 miles, Monster offers filters of 5 days or 10 days and 20 miles or 50 miles; and when Monster finds no results (indicating limited coverage) for a specified search, they substantially broaden the search without notifying the user … returning many results that do not match the original intent.

   

LiveExpo placed third, perhaps indicating that organizations in smaller communities are more likely to use free classifieds rather than paying top dollar for listings on national job sites.

   

Just-Posted, despite a 5^th place showing in round one, came in last in this round, and therefore exits the competition.  Unfortunately the site was undone by a change in a third-party feed that resulted in erroneous records displaying for the Baker City search.

   

   

Best Job Sites – Round 3 Results

   

1. JobCentral
2. Indeed
3. LiveExpo
4. SimplyHired
5. Jobster
6. CareerBuilder
7. GetTheJob
8. HotJobs
9. Oodle
10. America’s Job Exchange
11. Jobs.com
12. Monster
13. Just-Posted

   

   

On to round four … which site offers users the best combination of ‘filters’ and ‘sorts’ to allow the display of search results in relevance order for user-specified date ranges and distances surrounding specific geographies?  May the best site win.

   

2007 Top Sites for Job Search – Indeed Wins Again

   

Two rounds, two wins for Indeed.

   

In this second round, fourteen of the top general job sites were tested to find jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Boston, MA.  Roughly five times the size of Tulsa, OK (round one test location), Boston provides plentiful job opportunities. Thus, this test puts more emphasis on the ability of each search engine to prioritize their search results.

   

Indeed continues to impress by providing the most relevant opportunities with very few duplicates.

   

   

Surprises in round two? 

   

GoogleBase dropped from third in round one to last in round two.   While GoogleBase did the best job of weeding out duplicates in this round, perhaps their methodology is too aggressive in eliminating marginal content and partial matches because in the end they returned the fewest relevant results.  As a result, GoogleBase won’t be back for found three.

   

Jobs.com jumped to third in round two, from ninth in round one – impressive, but I can’t explain it.  In round three we’ll see which of the previous rounds was a fluke.

   

Jobster tried my patience – their site was painfully slow yesterday – but no points were awarded or deducted for speed in this round.  Alexa data indicates that Jobster is “Slow (72% of sites are faster)”, but performance yesterday seemed atypical.

   

   

Best Job Sites – Round 2 Results

   

1. Indeed
2. SimplyHired
3. Jobs.com
4. CareerBuilder
5. America’s Job Exchange
6. Jobster
7. Monster
8. LiveExpo
9. Oodle
10. GetTheJob
11. Just-Posted
12. HotJobs
13. JobCentral
14. GoogleBase

   

   

Round three challenge?  Who has the most jobs listed for a small western town?  May the best site win.

   

2007 Top Sites for Job Search – Indeed Wins Round 1

   

Indeed takes the top spot in round one of the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition – not a surprise really since Indeed took overall honors in 2006.

   

In this first round of competition, fifteen of the top general job sites were tested to find jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Tulsa, OK.  To score well, sites needed sufficient ad content for Tulsa, plus they needed search technology that was powerful enough to find matching jobs without returning mismatches. 

   

Surprises in the first round? 

   

Craigslist is the first site to be eliminated from further competition as a result of a last place finish.  I’ve never been a fan of Craigslist (see here, here and here for background), but going in I expected them to finish mid-pack … after all, Craigslist does have a strong following.  In the end, simplistic search technology and limited ad volume in Tulsa were Craig’s undoing.  Yes, the results would have been different if the test location had been San Francisco; but, doesn’t that make Craig’s more like a collection of regional sites as opposed to a national site?  I think so.

   

HotJobs and Monster in the bottom five … ironic that two of the big-three job boards garner so much traffic and yet performed so poorly in this round.   

   

Just-Posted, a site that almost no one has heard of (Alexa traffic rank = 1,559,714) was fifth, leveraging their next-generation search technology to muscle past many of the big guns.

   

Best Job Sites – Round 1 Results

   

1. Indeed
2. SimplyHired
3. GoogleBase
4. Jobster
5. Just-Posted
6. CareerBuilder
7. LiveExpo
8. Oodle
9. Jobs.com
10. JobCentral
11. Monster
12. HotJobs
13. GetTheJob
14. America’s Job Exchange
15. Craigslist   

   

   

So let’s head to the round 2 challenge – finding jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Boston, MA.  May the best job site win.

   

2007 Top Sites for Job Search

   

Who will be first?  Which of the following fifteen sites provides the best combination of content, features, and ease-of-use for active job search?

   

To make my list of 2007 competitors, a site must provide national coverage of the job market and contain ads for most types of jobs in the economy – for simplicity, let’s refer to these competitors as general job sites.

   

As you can imagine, with 40,000+ job sites to choose from, there are many excellent niche sites that can be better choices than any of these fifteen general sites in certain cases – e.g. theLadders in the $100k+ market, and Dice in the tech market, to name only two.  However, as good as some of these niche boards are, their ad volume is often quite low, so even dedicated niche board users will often watch one or more general job sites when actively searching for a new job.

   

So which of the following general job sites is best in 2007?  That’s what we’ll find out by challenging the competitors to a series of tests, with the poorest performer in each test eliminated from further competition.  In a competition like this, it’s just as important for each competitor to have few weaknesses as it is to have strengths.  May the best site win.

   

   

First challenge – Find jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Tulsa, OK.  Who wins?  Who goes home?  Stay tuned.

   

   

The Big Three

CareerBuilder

HotJobs

Monster

   

Vertical Integrators

Indeed

Oodle

SimplyHired

   

General Classifieds

Craigslist

GoogleBase

LiveExpo

   

Federally Endorsed*

America’s Job Exchange

JobCentral

Jobs.com

   

Next-Gen Search

GetTheJob

Jobster

Just-Posted

   

   

* In preparation for the shutdown of America’s Job Bank, the Department of Labor published Training and Employment Notice 27-06, which included a copy of a Federal Register Notice outlining the criteria for inclusion in a list of links of private sites providing functionality similar to AJB.   

   

JobCentral Rolls Out Next-Generation Job Search

   

With few exceptions (e.g. Just-Posted and Itzbig), search technology has remained essentially unchanged for the past ten years – we still enter a few keywords, we still hope employers are using the same words, and we still sift through volumes of marginally related results – or worse, we stare at some variant of the message ‘no jobs match your search criteria.’ 

   

The problem is simply this – keyword-based search is a poor proxy for intention-based search. 

   

Intention-based search differs dramatically in that each search has two equally important components:

   

¾      First, search terms/phrases entered by the user are interpreted by the system to identify the intent or theme of the search; and,

   

¾      Then, content matching the intent or theme is displayed … it doesn’t matter if the original search terms are included in the ad text, so long as the ad falls within users’ intent.

   

The image at right illustrates the following example of intention-based search from JobCentral’s new search engine:

   

First, I select the ‘Occupation Title’ search option.

   

Second, I enter words that describe the type of position I’m seeking … note that I’ve chosen to use ‘medical lab tech’, but I could have entered skills or duties.

   

Third, the system interprets my search terms and offers five occupational themes for me to choose from … in this case I’ve chosen ‘Medical and Clinical Laboratory Technicians’.  As a side note, this is a standard ONET occupation for which significant labor market information exists, including employment growth projections and possible employers … more on this in a follow-up post.

   

Fourth, the JobCentral system then returns ads within this occupational area.  In fact, no keywords were used to generate this list once I selected the occupational category.  Cool!

   

A scan of the results looks pretty good, but not perfect … yet.  This first release of JobCentral’s new search engine is just beginning to leverage their structured data; so accuracy should improve as the engine is refined and additional metadata elements are incorporated. 

   

I think the same can be said regarding the interface … it’s a bit complicated, and I noticed a few quirks. For example, between steps three and four I had to manually remove my search terms from the keyword box to search for all ads within the occupational category.

   

No matter … JobCentral’s new intention-based search is a big step towards the goal of a more intuitive search process that returns highly relevant search results.  Kudos JobCentral!

   

   

Note:  JobCentral uses O*NET-SOC AutoCoder software from R.M. Wilson Consulting, Inc. to assign occupational metadata. 

   

The Ultimate Job Search Engine

   

Are you looking for (or trying to build) the ultimate job search engine? Jeff Tokarz, founder of Just-Posted, asked me to describe the key features that jobseekers look for in job boards and job search engines.

   

Check out the post on Jeff’s blog and let me know if I missed anything that is important to you.

   

And Jeff, thanks for asking!

   

Bob  :-)

   

I’m Liking Just-Posted and Jeff Tokarz

   

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?

   

Perhaps the market doesn’t care about relevance because:

   

-          better search reduces page-views per user, and sites are measured by traffic metrics rather than customer outcomes;

   

-          advertising dollars are inversely related to market efficiency – 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’m not willing to concede that market participants don’t care about search relevance.  I’m convinced that if a job board delivers broad coverage and superior search at a fair price, market participants will migrate to this site and away from less efficient players.  Not surprising then that I’m liking Just-Posted and Jeff Tokarz. 

   

The Just-Posted site combines broad market coverage (using spidering technology ala Simply Hired and Indeed) with substantially higher search relevance … my initial tests indicate a 70% improvement in accuracy as compared to the industry average.  And Jeff is one of the few other voices in the industry who consistently advocates for improved relevance.

   

If you too care about job search relevance, keep an eye on Just-Posted and Jeff Tokarz.