Vertical Job Search – Promises Broken, or Promises Kept

   

At the heart of the vertical job search phenomenon is the promise that jobseekers will find all of the available jobs in one place.  In truth, this is impossible, since a high percentage of job openings are filled through word-of-mouth rather than through job ads.   

   

Nonetheless, vertical job sites promise the following:

   

GetTheJob – “Finally, a site with all the jobs!”  (source: GetTheJob homepage)

Indeed – “one search. all jobs.”  (source: Indeed tag line)

Jobster – “Search millions of jobs from across the web”  (source: Jobster homepage)

SimplyHired – “We have more jobs than anyone, anywhere!”  (source: SimplyHired Q&A)

   

Sad to say, some of these promises aren’t being kept.

   

Perhaps you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you’re looking for a job.  Craigslist has a very strong following in this market, and they are a key source of daily job ads.  Vertical search sites, if they’re keeping their promises, should allow you to watch Craigslist at the same time you’re watching all of the other sources indexed by the verticals.

   

So you visit your favorite vertical, and you see that they do have content from Craigslist – so you assume that if they have some, they have it all.  Unfortunately, vertical job search is still fairly immature, and the links between content providers and content indexers are sometimes tenuous – resulting in broken promises.

   

Using a random sample of 30 job ads, posted this week to Craigslist in the SF Bay Area, I searched each of the big-three vertical job sites:

   

Indeed – promise kept – I found 29 of the 30 ads;

SimplyHired – promise broken – I found 4 of the 30 ads; and,

Jobster – promise broken – I found none of the 30 ads.       

   

Infrequent problems can hit any site at any time, so perhaps tomorrow the results would be different.  However, there really is no excuse for keeping customers in the dark when there’s a problem.   Providing a status page that indicates when data has stopped flowing from key sources (e.g. Craigslist) doesn’t show weakness … it reinforces the trust you are trying to build with your customers.  So far, none of the job verticals provide this transparency.

   

Comments

[Steven Kempton]

This is a REALLY great point. Thanks for enlightening me. With the information driven society we live in, isn't so comforting to trust someone when they say, "look, we have all the pertinent information, you don't need to look for a second opinion". Vertical job search is in it's infancy but who knows how long the trust levels would last with candidates if someone consistently ranked this kind of detail?

[Bob Wilson]

Great feedback Steven! Thanks for posting!

Based on the above post, at least one of the major job verticals is working on a status page to keep their customers informed.

Hopefully, all will follow.

Bob :-)