Job hunting is a massive industry, but unfortunately it’s one that that always leaves job hunters feeling unsatisfied.Monster and Dice are painful to use. The hierarchy trees of job categories are often incorrect and confusing to someone who is looking for a job. There are a few places that are doing something different:
LinkedIn - resume and networking tools to keep in contact with ex-coworkers. The best way to find a job is often through people who know you. You get a job, they often get a referral bonus — win/win.
Doing your own SEO – if you can promote yourself in an effective way, then you are bound to end up with more leads. One of the most effective ways that you can promote yourself or your online business is if you embrace search engine optimisation. SEO, as it is better known, is the process of making sure that Google promotes your results higher in the search engine results. You can achieve this by writing quality content and building something of worth for users. One of the things that an seo company will frequently recommend is to monitor your site speed and your inbound links. If you can make your site quick and you don’t try to ‘game’ the algorithms, you can promote your website, or even your CV, very highly in Google.
Peter’s New Jobs - regional tech job searches in Ottawa and Toronto, worth the yearly subscription even if you have a job because it’s a great way to stay current with the job market and how companies are doing.
Standout Jobs - Montreal startup that is focused on humanizing the job search process and giving companies a chance to sell themselves.
Working With Rails - job listings based on people working with a common technology.
Site-based Job Boards – job listings for readers of blogs like 37signals, Joel on Software, and Tech Crunch.
There are a few things I’d like to see in a job search site.
LinkedIn Integration
LinkedIn has taken over as the business contacts networking tool and it has a robust resume feature, yet we’re still forced to manually enter our resume into most job sites.
No Job Categories
Job sites like Dice and Monster all suffer from bad usability with elements like the job category navigation that takes several minutes to fill out. It’s so much simpler to have saved search agents for keywords in resumes and job postings.
Google Maps
I’d really like to see all of the job locations on a Google Map centered around my home address with different colours based on how the fresh the listing is. Job decision is often based on locality and I’ve yet to see a job search site that lets me easily list.
Stock History
For publicly trade companies there is no reason not to integrate a stock ticker widget so that job applicants can quickly see how a company is performing.
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