Job seekers vent frustration with online career board status quo

By Jennifer LeClaire (posted by Rafael)

With competition for employment on the rise – and with layoffs making headlines across the nation – many job seekers are kicking online searches into high gear hoping to land a steady paycheck.

That seems like a solid strategy considering recent data from the Inavero Institute for Service Research. An August 2008 survey concluded 50 percent of hiring managers use online job boards more than any other recruiting tool. In fact, these hiring managers revealed that 72 percent of the salaried jobs they needed to fill were posted to an online job board as part of the search strategy.

Despite the prevalence of recruiters who say they are still heading online to find qualified candidates, however, job seekers are voicing frustrations with the status quo. Chief complaints include job board spam, irrelevant listings, confusion over keyword searches and a decreasing number of job postings.

“Whether a good economy or bad, online job seekers and recruiters voice similar complaints about traditional online job boards,” says Rafael Cosentino, vice president of business development for RealMatch.com. “But recruiters and the online job board industry can learn plenty from listening to the frustrations of candidates who are often desperately seeking employment. We need to better serve these candidates.”

Job Boards that Stutter

Jelena Woehr has a self-admitted pet peeve about mainstream job boards – she hates it when boards are programmed to search listings on several other sites and return pages upon pages of the same listing posted in several places.  “Would it really be so hard to program the search engine to eliminate results that are exactly the same?” asks Woehr, a social marketer in Golden, Co. “Google does it, so why can’t job boards? It’s such a pain to see 60 results and then realize there are only six jobs fitting my search terms, but each is listed 10 times.”

Karen Whiting, an author and speaker based in Grasonville, Md., is frustrated with services like CareerBuilder that she says blatantly ignore the parameters of the job search. “Even though you request listings for jobs in the marine engineering field in the $90,000-plus range, they constantly send listings for sales positions and high school grads,” Whiting explains.

Willy Franzen has a laundry list of frustrations. Franzen graduated from Cornell University in 2006 and began job searching in the fall. He said he was pretty picky about what he was looking for and wound up undergoing a long job search that yielded few prospects he could get excited about.

Don’t We Get Enough Spam?

A common beef with online job boards is spam. Job seekers are frustrated with illegitimate postings that only distract them from their mission, and blame job boards for allowing spammers and advertisers to clutter results. 

Shannon Ramos cites spam e-mails for off-topic jobs, get rich quick schemes and search results that don’t match the parameters of her queries. But Ramos, a relief escrow officer and mobile notary public in San Dimas, Calif., has a particular beef with Monster.com: “I don’t appreciate the tons of ‘commercials’ I have to say ‘no thanks’ to,” she says. “If I wanted to go to college or get a loan, I wouldn’t be job hunting.”

The Free Job Board Stigma

It’s one thing to be annoyed by irrelevant job listings when you are merely keeping an eye out for the next rung in your career ladder. But when paying your mortgage depends on finding a new job fast, entering keywords into a search box and hoping for the right match can be a harrowing experience.

Allan Hess knows that feeling all too well. He is in the midst of his fourth time through what he calls “the mill.” Back in 1999 the free job boards were a blessing, he says, but today those same boards are riddled with spams and scams, he says.

“The boards have stooped to prostitute themselves to compete and generate revenue, so they seem to sell or allow junk to be sent out. Even while surfing the boards, you are now bombarded by ads from various schools, and for work at home gimmicks,” says Hess, of Marietta, Ga. Hess has held leadership positions in business development, marketing and sales in the I.T. industry. “All this is a distraction.”

“We took a critical look at all the problems that plague the legacy job boards and I’m proud of our solution”, says Cosentino of Realmatch.com.  “RealMatch is listening, you won’t find our service clogged with spam, scams and irrelevant listings.  Our matching technology produces relevant results for both sides of the table,” says Cosentino.  “As Employers abandon the “pay-to-post” pricing model, job listings are disappearing from the sites that had listings years ago.  As employers and candidates adopt new and better technology like Realmatch.com, finding a job and hiring a candidate is finally getting easier.