Combining the advantages of passive and active job search, email alerts allow you to save job search criteria and receive matching jobs sent directly to you on a user-specified schedule – you can sit back and let the jobs come to you. Problem is, the execution on most sites leaves much to be desired.
Scouts typically search the most recent content (although this is user configurable on some sites), limiting the volume of opportunities (fine on the surface), but unfortunately small data sets expose the weaknesses of today’s search engine technology.
For you see, with rare exception (e.g. Just-Posted), today’s search engines determine relevance by ranking available content rather than comparing each ad against a standardized scale of relevance. Predictably, when data sets are small, perhaps containing no truly relevant results, most search engines will still blindly rank the results, delivering poor or even ridiculous results.
So unless you like perusing daily emails containing mostly irrelevant results, size matters … the job sites with the most ads can return more relevant results. And so it was in this test, with the three vertical integrators taking the top three spots.
The winner, SimplyHired, separated itself from the rest by scoring highest in relevance, and allowing users to setup alerts without first having to setup accounts. And as a fringe benefit, clicking on an emailed ad brings you to a landing page on SimplyHired with info about the advertiser, additional jobs at the same firm, and related jobs in the area. Brilliant.
In contrast, HotJobs requires users to setup accounts; and at least in this test, 50% of the ads sent via email by HotJobs were no longer available 45 minutes after the email was received. So HotJobs exits the competition.
Best Job Sites – Round 8 Results
Next up, the ‘associated services’ round.
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