Finding diamonds appeals to me – shoveling coal to find diamonds most definitely does not. And when it comes to job search, we’re still shoveling way too much coal.
Paul Forster, of Indeed.com, posted an excellent blog entry this week, The Search Learning Curve, regarding an observed change in user behavior – search strings are getting longer. And it started me thinking about Paul’s premise, user motivation, and the need for a dramatic improvement in search technology.
Yes, users appear to be learning to use longer search strings. But do they have a choice in the face of increasing volumes of data and search results that are returned without relevance scores?
Paul provides an illustrative example using search words (internet research analyst) and geography filter (New York City) to reduce the result set of a job search from an unmanageable 30,000 records to, in his terms, a “very manageable set” of 200 jobs.
Now what? Job titles can be vague, and search results are returned without relevance scores, so we need to look at the description of each job. A cursory review, less than one minute per job, would still require more than three hours! How many users are motivated to spend three hours reviewing the results of a single query? I’m guessing the answer is ‘not many.’
Instead of facing 200 search results – a mix of ‘diamonds’ and ‘coal’ – wouldn’t it be great to see just the diamonds of various clarities and cut? Yes, we’d want to retain the ability to look at the ‘coal’ – but honestly, job search is about finding diamonds … not shoveling coal.
Comments