Originals, duplicates, and relevancy
Reading the Deans of Job Search Relevance, Hawaiian Bob and Jeff Tokarz, gives great insight to anyone interested in job search engine relevancy.
That being said, I have a question for the Deans. Why are original jobs and duplicate jobs, found on job search engines, treated in the same manner when it comes to relevancy?
My two cents - Jobs originating and residing on corporate career sites should be weighted with more relevance than duplicate postings pulled from one or many other sources, i.e. job boards. No question, job boards have and will continue to be used as an effective advertising medium, although as it pertains to job search engine relevance, corporate career sites provide the most relevant and up-to-date job content on the web. This rule would obviously not apply to companies without coprorate career sites.
So Deans, and anyone else out there willing to comment, what are your two cents?
Great question Chad … worthy of a thoughtful response, and I must admit that this isn’t a topic I’ve given much thought until you raised it.
Your question is generating a flood of ideas that I need to process before responding. Within the next day or so I’ll post a proper answer.
Keep up the great blogging.
Bob
Thanks Bob. I know there has been much discussion about job search relevancy, although none focused on what I feel is the most relevant piece of the formula, pure jobs vs. duplicates. I look forward to your response and future blog posts.
chad, the premise that the employer’s site is the most up-to-date is not a safe one. incredible but true - at LatPro.com we often find recruiters will give us a URL that doesn’t work because the ats hasn’t caught up yet with recruiting. we catch the errors because we review everything by hand. it’s safe to assume other job boards don’t. so it’s possible a real open position is posted on a job board when the position doesn’t exist yet on the ats.
Chad -
Thank you for fertilizing the ‘relevance’ issue (opportunity).
Your question, “Why are original jobs and duplicate jobs, found on job search engines, treated in the same manner when it comes to relevancy?”, suggests that job search engines are incapable of delivering relevant job search results because they are not the original source of the job posts.
An online job posting’s relevance (to a search query) is less a function of where it originated or was sourced, i.e., corporate career sites, job boards, job search engines, etc., than (1) its composition, and (2) a job search engine’s capacity to discern degrees of relevance.
Corporate recruiters and third-party staffing firms seeking to enhance the visibility and potency of their jobs (in the job market) are encouraged to write well conceived, optimized job posts. Here, too, corporate career sites, job boards and job search engines must, in order to reduce recruitment program costs, meet headcount requirements, enhance revenue drivers, etc., embrace technology (readily available) that will deliver exceedingly relevant online job search results.
The competition for talent is fierce. Start by giving online job seekers ‘more’ of what they want [relevant job search results] and ‘less’ of what they don’t want [mediocre, irrelevant job search results].
I could go on and on forever, but you only want my “two cents”!
Eric - Understood, although when the posting hits the corporate career site, 5 minutes or days later, I believe it should be weighted with a higher relevance due to the source.
Jeff - You\’re speaking composition, which is an incredibly important factor. I\’m talking more about \”Trusted Sources\”, two entirely different factors in achieving relevance. I don\’t believe there is 1 sole factor in achieving high relevance, do you?
Many thanks for the comments Gents!
Chad -
A ‘trusted source’ can, indeed, be a determining factor in achieving high relevance (job search results). It is one of many factors (including composition, timeliness, technology, etc.) that should be considered! At the same time - posts from a ‘trusted source’ may never be viewable by job seekers because they were poorly written and/or are trapped in a technology platform (i.e., job search engine, jobs database, ATS, XML feed, etc.) incapable of accurately understanding and processing search requests. Prevailing job boards, job search engines, applicant tracking systems, etc. are an amalgam of third-party and/or in-house solutions combined to give job seekers access to available corporate job opportunities with little regard for the user (job seeker) experience. A visit to nearly any corporate career site, career portal, job board, etc. (with job search functionality) will immediately reveal the challenge faced by job seekers and in-house recruiters. While this environment may have been sufficient several years ago, legacy systems are showing their age and giving way to affordable solutions (visit: http://www.Just-Posted.com, http://rmwilsonconsulting.com) that signficantly improve the effectiveness of recruiting programs.
I am anxious to hear what fellow writers think.
Thanks.
Jeff
Chad -
Just a follow-up note!
Your statement, “I don’t believe there is 1 sole factor in determine high relevance”, is dead-on!
At the risk of selfishly plugging the work we are doing at Just-Posted (http://www.Just-Posted.com) …. our job search engine goes beyond merely matching keywords, city and state locations, etc. to discern relevance. It uses ‘29′ advanced technology platforms such as natural language processing, latent semantic analysis, Bayesian belief network, morphological analysis, etc. to dynamically deliver exceedingly relevant job search results. Here, too, job seekers can independently raise and/or lower their job search ‘relevance’ threshold to hone in on very exacting, highly relevant, job search results or view a more relaxed, larger pool of job search results.
I just raised you “28″ cents!
Thanks.
Jeff
Ok Jeff you’re starting to sound like the guy from e-Harmony, “We use 29 dimensions of your job seeking personality”. Actually, I might want to trademark that one ;o)
Chad … it’s all above the love!
Chad - Curious why job seekers will pay $ 30 per month to the ladders when we have these aggregators( including just-posted) who offer up releant results to the job search ?