One Month Roundup

I’ve been at this for about a month.   So…what have I learned….

Right off the top of my head here are the big items…

• You can easily drown in the job information pool.   The big boards all have gazillions of jobs, with multiple ways of slicing and dicing the information.   You can spend hours looking on any one of the big boards.  (Maybe replace ‘spend’ with ‘waste’ in the previous sentence.)  

• The information out there is not all it is cracked up to be.  (There are times when ‘crack’ seems to be a good metaphor!)  The numbers don’t always add up; the searches don’t deliver as promised.   Certainly this was true of the e-mail promises for new listings.   

• There is much to suggest that this is a three way guessing game with the employer, the computer and the job hunter all trying to win the ‘job match’ game by finding the same words in a text listing of a job description..  
• Note: the computer is probably the only one with a fighting chance…and it doesn’t care!

Pretty obvious…Next, some items to look out for.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time in a little town in bucolic New England,  I was a member of the School Board.  (You ask…What does this have to do with job hunting?)  It provides my claim to knowing at least a little about what the other side of this process looks like.

In this long, long ago world there were no computer job searches.  To post a job, you put an ad in the appropriate newspaper or magazine and maybe some other places and waited for the mail to come rolling in.   In time, you stopped the ad and started looking at the pile of resumes and cover letters. 

The goal was the same as it is today – getting a short list of the candidates with the best match. 

In those bygone days without the benefits of a keyword, what did you do?  For a school superintendent you took the pile (neatly stacked and organized by the Board’s secretary) and started through.   First step:  Doctorate or No Doctorate?  Doctorates -> continue pile; No doctorate -> out.   Next step: Superintendent experience?  Continue vs. Wastebasket.  And so on and so forth until you had a stack where it was reasonable to start reading the cover letters and resumes.

I have no reason to believe that the goal has not changed.   Here is my question – is today’s computer aided process really effective and efficient in producing this short list? 

This question is always in the back of my mind as I explore the job boards.   I do admit to having a prejudice in thinking that maybe the process is not what it ought to be.

DICE

Time for checking out another board.  DICE is the next victim.  DICE has a reputation as one of the top boards for tech jobs.

Google score for DICE = 3.   However, this time it’s three different website listings.   Item number 4 in the Google listings is the Wikipedia entry for ‘dice’ and DICE is simply out of contention.   No entries in Wikipedia, where the concentration is on the six-sided little cubes in all their glory.

Now for those of you who think that this research is not enlightening, this morning I even learned a new word – disambiguation.   That’s Wikipedia-ese for clearing up the ambiguities on common words.   Sorry, DICE; you didn’t even make it into the disambiguation list for ‘dice’, which even included a ‘German prog rock band’.  You definitely lost this popularity contest.

Now back to the three listings. 

• First up is dice.com/register.   Hit this and you are stuck with setting up a logon for DICE.  It’s the only option.  Tricky, making this the first option and getting you to sign up.
• On to the next,  plain vanilla dice.com.   This is the opening page if you want to try out their options.   Pretty standard.  
• And finally, there is seeker.dice.com/jobresearch, etc….  And as advertised this is their advanced search options.  

They are all clearly labeled for what they do.   I started with the middle version.

DICE did not do well for me.   On the standard search there were no ‘IT Auditor’ jobs and only four for CISA.  Some company searching showed that GE (= General Electric) who has jobs all over everywhere else is not in their company listings.   Wow!… 

I do like some of DICE’s breakdown categories, however.   There’s a ‘skill’ listing and also a breakdown for telecommuting and travel, which I haven’t seen before.   DICE also hit ‘ok’ on having most of the standard options and once I found the button for search and job saving, the set up couldn’t have been easier (or am I just getting used to doing this?).  

It’s worth a second look….I’ll be back.

Scope Creep

Scope Creep?

Example:   I need to get the grill ready for the first of the summer hamburgers.  My estimate is about a half hour to dust off the grill.   Whoops…seems I didn’t do the final cleaning before packing it away.  Now I need the wire brush and the grill spray and I better find some rubber gloves to make sure that the Grill Grime Gone spray doesn’t disintegrate my fingers.  Where did I put all these things last fall?  Better revise my time estimate….

That’s scope creep.

I’ve posted the attributes that I’m looking for in a spreadsheet with the columns for each of the big boards.  That was the plan.  Then I could go forward with other boards using the items from the big boards as a measure.  List the main functions down the columns, boards across the top.  Take Monster first.  Starting with the most basic items, I start listing the options:

• Keywords, job titles
• Location
• Set a search agent
• Save a job
• Ads
• Posting date
• Radius
• Etc.

As I go from board to board, I find that there are different nuances in each board.  After finishing with Monster, Indeed has some new options and now I need to see if there is something similar on Monster.

This could get worse with each new board!  My scope is creeping off as rapidly as a baby going after candy!

Can I get it under control?