Build the community + add in relevant jobs around it = Job Search 2.0 ?
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You might have noticed that in this list you can find the Watjob; Alootechie job board; and Startup jobs in india of the blogosphere - but not say… a Monster or Naukri. Now this is not a slam on Naukri or Monster .On the contrary, I think that Naukri & Monster has really been an evolutionary force in the Indain Job Search.
What about all of the other upcoming players? How about WhereIsMyBoss.com,a job portal that features an online video interviewing facility, dubbed LiveConnect? Awesome.
What about the aggregators like recruit.net? Innovative and revolutionizing the recruiting space? Yes! Web 2.0? Absolutely (depending on how you define it).
And THEN - there is an increasing number of professional networks like brijj and Techtribe? I am still trying to work out how and where all of this fits in. But is any of this what I mean when I say Job Search 2.0? …not so much.
Here is what I am thinking…
All of these job sites have, well, jobs as their center point. In my view (which is still developing so please jump in and help me sort this out) - what the blog boards are doing for Job Search 2.0 is flipping the current ‘job search’ model. The ’search’ doesn’t happen on sites dedicated to finding jobs. The audience is no longer the community of job seekers that lakhs of marketing rupees are spent on to bring them to a ‘Monstrous’ huge cluster of available jobs in any and all areas and industries.
With Job Search 2.0 - the niche community is built first. The tech geeks; the designers; the new media marketers; the nurses gather together through social media like blogs… and then the job opportunities are added in to the community. Jobs become just another piece of relevant content to that audience.
JobSearch 2.0 will have the users creating their own job aggregators via their feedreaders. They will subscribe to job feeds of the online communities that they align themselves with. The job seekers will be the ones to drive their job search and subscribe to only the content that they want (again relevancy). Michael Arrington from CrunchBoard brought up the issue of making the job content more portable and easier to distribute by creating a sort of blog job board network with distribution through a widget. Many job focused sites have already opened up their API and are doing just this.While Naukri is still focused on the ‘job’ as their vertical, they are dead on with regard to their ease of job content portability.
I am not saying that a job vertical focus is a bad thing; rather, I am just making a distinction between the current focus and direction of job sites and Job Search 2.0 sites that are focused on their niche community, their topics, their discussion - the addition of ‘jobs’ as additional relevant content that lives in the same house as all of the other content that their niche audience cares about.
“If you want to hire the right person then you’ll need to do something different to reach that person. You need to hang out where they hang out. You need to like what they like. You need to aim accurately.”
Going forward, people will be able to find an online community for just about anything that they are interested it (professionally and otherwise). Does this mean that I think Job Search 2.0 will kill the Monsters or even the Naukris? No. Different strokes for different job seekers, different interests, and different skill sets. All sites that stay around will continue to evolve and figure out ways to remain relevant. Job Search 2.0 is not different. It is just beginning and developing before our eyes.
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Even though Naukri.com revamped the site to 2.0 status, the jobs are still the same; atleast for freshers.
Most of the jobs you get in your inbox are like “Pay 50% after placement…”, “BPO jobs…” .etc. which can be categorized as SPAM.
Great article. I find it very useful. It is increasing difficult for job seekers
to find the right jobs.
That is why I think the push approach is better. For instance, active jobseekers
can use a site like activeJobseekers.com to announce their availability to
employers. And employers can contact them know fully well that the candidate is
actively looking for job.
Laura
I both agree and disagree with you. First the agreement: Yes, for a successful Job Search 2.0, the jobs have to come to the users, not the other way round, like what is happening today. There has to be a community in place which has access to relevant jobs. But this model has a flaw. The community will be diversified and so all the jobs posted will not be of interest to the whole community. This means spam generation for a majority of users. Thats bad!!
We are a start up, in Beta phase of our life cycle and are working on a product which tries to solve the above problem. It would be good to discuss things with you, if you are interested!!
nice post
ya sure mayank mail me any time at chandan619 at gmail.
I’m not sure if you guys have covered this -
http://www.toostep.com/login.html
its definitely relevant to the context… and yes, like most other things we see now, we could have a long tail of niche sites with the monsters making the big head..
@chandan … great article, always good to hear your thoughts on this space
@Mayank … I agree with Chandan that there is a strong trend in more restricted vertical communities - where people share a more narrow interest. People want a place to go that is focused on their particular needs or interests. In these vertical communities the problem of job targeting you raise is less. And even in a diversified community, there are technical and social ways to make sure people don’t get spammed with stuff they don’t want. All that being said, good luck with your new venture! (Full disclosure - I am a founder or techtribe.com, mentioned in this article)
Bud: Thanks for the encouragement! Yes you are right. Building well defined, yet flexible verticals seems to be the key. Building a community and then sprinkling jobs there might not suffice, because I feel that Job Hunting, in itself is a vertical(big time in India). Should we not recognize this fact and target our energies to satisfy the needs of the people looking for jobs..
I completely agree to you guys. As far as job portals in India are concerned, the situation can be immensely frustrating sometimes. The cluttered up descriptions of the sites and confusing categories of jobs can be real pain ! Then there is the problem of tags… goodness… you have to spend hours to find out the right one for you !
Well…job search 2.0 sounds interesting but we have to take care of few things. That is, besides looking to it that people are not showered with meaningless stuffs, we also have to take care that it comprises almost everybody interested in the particular offering.
Job search 2.0 can be a success only if the categories of jobs as found in the job portals are increased and the CVs are directly handled by the HRs.
It might interest you to go through the following link which speaks about the same issue…
http://maketicklive.com/blogs/