Posts Tagged ‘Job Search’
How JobShouts will help change the job board landscape.
Last Updated on Saturday, 13 June 2009 07:00 Written by Mike Monday, 6 April 2009 11:35
It’s been just over 2 months since we launched jobshouts.com. In that short amount of time we have learned quite a lot about how the job & employment sectors are evolving. The job boards/print media businesses are in flux. Newspapers are filing bankruptcy protection. Social media and the interwebs are forcing huge companies to evolve. How much longer before the job boards (that are owned by large media conglomerates) are affected as well?
We have talked to several fortune 500 HR professionals. Employers are looking to shave expenses in the recruitment sector. There is a lot of competition for the job advertising dollar. The traditional pay to post job boards are taking a huge financial hit. How long will they continue to deliver an abundance of candidates that are under-qualified for your jobs?
Interesting companies are taking the lead and bringing cost effective solutions to HR departments and recruiters. From job boards and search engines; to applicant tracking systems. A new breed of job site scrapers, spiders, and applications are indeed changing the landscape.
Companies like Jobshouts & Linkup.com will be leading the way by offering cost effective solutions.
Jobshouts job listings are placed into the twitter stream. This makes your job instantly visible via search.twitter.com, twitterjobsearch.com or to candidates using a 3rd party client like tweetdeck or twhirl. Real-time search? perfect for the job market.
Linkup.com pulls jobs from employer only job sites. A fresh new idea, one that will probably be imitated by many in the near future. Linkup is unlike the aggregate sites like indeed & simply hired. Those sites are mostly scraping the big boards, crap in, crap out.
Getting job search results in Google is not effective. Unless you are using a large board, the challenge of finding candidates is difficult to say the least. Even if you are a Fortune 500 company with a highly visible, expensive web site. The chances of your job listings showing up in organic results is slim to none. This only works for candidates that are highly intelligent, and familiar with Boolean search algorithms, and people looking to work for your company directly.
Social media is changing that. Did someone say Twitter search? Twitter is quickly gaining ground as a tool to search what is happening right now. Real time search is the new search industry buzzword. What better place to have your jobs exposed? At jobshouts we feel that twitter’s search engine is a perfect medium to broadcast job openings. Fresh relevant content that will deliver highly focused candidates.
Twitter has gained immense traction as a networking tool. One that is highly effective at finding information that is relevant and pertinent to its users. That is if you know how to use it effectively. I wonder how many affiliate marketing deals we will see. Twitter 101 anyone?
Google is a great search engine, however for job seekers it is often, confusing and difficult. It is highly biased to the industry veterans, the career builder and monster.com sites. They have bought and paid for every single search keyword related to employment, effectively blocking the competition from delivering real jobs to the average job seeker.
Watch what Google says about twitter closely. First was the public downplay “twitter is the poor man’s email”, then comes the rumors of negotiations to purchase (that’s happening now). Then a likely buy offer, countered by Microsoft’s anti-trust bandwagon in an attempt to block Google’s monopolization of real-time search traffic. Personally I would like to see twitter remain its own entity.
Quit rambling Mike! You said how can jobshouts change this?
We have given thought to releasing our platform as Open Source to further development. Our aim is to improve the job board industry. Exposing our platform as open source is a logical step as our code is based on another open source product called jobberbase. Re-releasing the twitter integration and user profiles that we added to the US development community would improve the product immensely. While making it very simple to integrate within a corporate web space.
If Jobshouts is released as OS, you can bet you will see a change in the job board market. Employers will be able run their own boards. Job boards will shift from the pay to post model to a pay per click, or free model. It’s exciting to be part of a huge market that is ripe for change.
A centralized database could provide millions of jobs to thousands of boards, localized, specialized, niche, sales, IT, medical, HR you name it the sky is the limit. This is my vision of how the job board market could take shape. There are many others that feel this way. We have talked to quite a few and will likely align ourselves with some key players in the very near future. Stay tuned for further developments.
I would love to see high quality, fresh relevant jobs delivered right in front of the eyeballs of those who need it most. The jobseeker. That and of course our original goal of delivering a cost effective solution to employers.
What do you think? How can we improve on this? What do you bring to the table? D you want to work with us to build a better mousetrap?
Tags: job board, Job Search, social media | Posted under Geek Tech | No Comments
Our site on local channel Baynews 9
Last Updated on Saturday, 13 June 2009 07:02 Written by Mike Sunday, 1 March 2009 12:35
Wow! that’s about how I sum up the feeling of seeing your work recognized in the media. Thurday Feb 26th, 2009 exactly 1 month after launching JobShouts. We were given that opportunity.
Robin was our PR spokesperson that day, appearing for a whole 2:43 of Television coverage. I sat in the control room watching the event take place.
they left me alone with all those buttons?
That was probably the highlight of the year for me. Seeing our project develop much faster than expected was a huge rush, I wonder if I had a silly grin on my face as I sat in the Directors chair.
When I shot this twitpic Robin had just sat down, in the web center, I could see her on a small window just above the closest monitor on the left.
I could also see a shot of the NYC side of the Hudson river. Odd I thought, I wondered if they were watching for another plane to land there.
A few moments later 5 people came into the control room to run sound checks, position cameras, cue teleprompter scripts.
I must have been grinning like a schoolboy in a candy store.
Cue lights, sound, roll tape er spin up the HDD, ACTION 
Erica Riggins conducted the interview in typical conservative bn9 fashion. After an initial introduction The questions started.
Robin was amazing on the monitors for the amount of anxiety she must have felt. I give her kudos for only stumbling a couple times. I fully expected to be briefly interviewed about what topics were of interest to the viewers, before taping. Next time we do a little more prep work.
Tags: Job Search, Media, News, press | Posted under Geek Tech | No Comments
JobShouts vs. JobAngels
Last Updated on Saturday, 13 June 2009 07:03 Written by Mike Saturday, 14 February 2009 12:01
This had to be written, two separate ideas, two separate entities, one a cause, ours a business adventure.
JobAngels was the thought of one guy, Mark Stelzner. He was watching the twitter ‘stream’ one morning, he saw tweople talking about job loss, job searches, #jobs hashtags, including @jobshouts. That morning of that first memorable #jobangels tweet was January 29th 2009.
JobShouts was 4 days old and had pulled in close to 400 followers, by chirping out job ads from recruiters, and HR personnel we had connected with. A lot of people liked what we were doing even @chrisbrogan, and @shelisrael gave us props
JobShouts was built as a site before we went live. Open Source based, modified with additional classes and functions, enabling us to talk to twitter. We built a site to compete with the big boards, without all the fluff, we just want JOBS. Being free I bet we can get a lot of them. What do you think?
A conference call was setup between the principals On Feb 11th 2009. The attendees were @tall_geek, @imjustagoyle, @emploerbrander, and @stelzner. We participated in a 30 minute conference call. Discussions centered mostly around what we were doing, suggestions of complementing each other by linking to each others sites. I offered a front page logo and a page to describe their efforts.
JobAngels won’t have a site for a couple more weeks. They are setting up a legit non-profit corp. crossing their t’s and dotting the i’s so to speak. Mark was pretty adamant about their need to “own their data”. That is the reason the site is not live already at Ning, or KickApps. We applaud their efforts, but I question for the need to “own” all that data. If your just a bunch of volunteers trying to help people get jobs. Why do you need to own “all the data”?
Jobshouts is a job board. A simple to use, free place to advertise that you are hiring. Because we are active with it and have built it around twitter, and social media, that has brought us some attention. Nice, but I don’t think we were ready for it.
Now it’s up to us to deliver. What good is all that attention if we don’t deliver something of value. JobShouts aims to do just that.
Tags: Job Search, JobAngels, News, press | Posted under Best of the Web, Life | No Comments
JobShouts and the press
Last Updated on Thursday, 12 February 2009 10:21 Written by Mike Thursday, 12 February 2009 10:21
How would you feel? Job Shouts mentioned in the blogosphere.
With JobAngels and JobShouts, Twitter helps jobless find work
Our project that launched two weeks ago has now appeared on two major internet blogs, and several medium career focused sites. about.com wrote a piece about jobshouts. The LA Times tech blogger David Sarno also wrote a piece on JobAngels, JobShouts, and twitter in the job search. That article appeared in print and in the Business Tech blog.
The realization that major media is recognizing your efforts is a great feeling. In the grand scheme of things, most people will go their whole lives without the kind of attention that our project has created.
We are growing quickly, but something told me this would be big before we went live.
In fact this could be huge, if done correctly we can create a large database of fresh, relevant, and current jobs. Something “disruptive” to the traditional boards. To use a phrase we hear repeatedly.
It’s really not what I wanted to hear
Another part of me reads those words, and a little voice in my head say”you can do better”. This is only the beginning, you have only scratched the surface. We are referred to as web innovators playing on the field of dreams, with no real revenue model cast. There is a model trust me 
Most of what we really want to do with jobshouts is not ready yet. More features are in development, features that the times left out of their article. We have layout changes, image branding, a blog platform to design. Lots of things to do. Our site will constantly be in flux, dynamic, changing to the needs of the empoyment community.
Then there’s the naysayer, the one that needs to stir the pot. Claiming we are doing no more than cluttering up the stream. There is always someone that will be jealous of others accomplishments. We have no intention of taking any of that to heart. We have heard time and again, we are offering a great service. Something tells me we might be bruising some egos. That’s what it takes to get to the top, you have to step on some toes on the way up.
the next step
The most important featuress of jobshouts.com will be incorporating social media to spread jobs & job news quickly. To connect people looking with those hiring. Job seekers will opt in, for relevant job notices, and networking opportunities. Sent via DM in 140 characters or less.
We fully expected the site to do well. We felt that recruiters and employers would welcome our service. Now we have to deliver candidates. After all what good is a service, if it does not meet our clients needs?
Only time will tell if our efforts will take root.
Tags: business, Job Search, jobs, press | Posted under Geek Tech | 2 Comments
