A search engine indexes online content and provides a quick and easy way to search and access what you are looking for. Google, the most used search engine uses complex ranking to identify the best content, and filter non-relevant and not important content. Google, Yahoo, ask.com are search engines that are horizontal, i.e. they index content across the board. A vertical search engine, is one that indexes a particular type of content, examples are shopping deals, hotel and airline rates, real estate and of course jobs. The touted advantages of vertical search engines are, since they concentrate on a small section of content, they can index more, they can identify more relevant sites and that they are quicker than the horizontal search engine in making content available for search. They make more sense when the content is time sensitive.
The Case for a Job Search Engine
Jobs are an ideal target for a vertical search engine. Jobs are time sensitive, a job posted today is more important than a job posted 60 days ago. A job search engine can target relevant sites, can index faster and make a job available for search faster than a horizontal search engine. A job search engine also makes job hunting easier as all jobs are available at a single site and job seekers can search and identify the best opportunities.
Requisites of a Good Job Search Engine
A job search engine needs to do two things very well to provide more value to job seekers than a horizontal search engine or major job boards, coverage and retrieval technology.
Coverage is defined as the number of jobs that a job search engine indexes, number of sites it indexes and how quickly a job posted in a site (job board or corporate web site) comes up on the job search engine. The number of jobs and the number of sites a job search engine indexes point to how well all the jobs posted in a geographical location and domain is covered. In the case of jobs, coverage needs to go along with speed. A Jobs is a time sensitive commodity. A job which was originally posted 60 days ago is of much lesser importance than a job posted yesterday. Chances are a job posted 60 days ago has already been filled up. So it is imperative that a job search engine index relevant jobs and sites in a way that jobs immediately show up in their index.
Retrieval Technology
A job search engine must provide an easy and effective means of identifying the best jobs for a particular job seeker. Most job search engines have not done any improvement to the core search and retrieval technology currently available on major job boards. They use keyword searches and filters.
A keyword search technically called a "bag of words" search, it splits the content into individual words, eliminate frequently used words like "a", "and", "or" etc and put them in a bag. A person searching for a particular word will be given a bag that contains that word.
A job is a highly structured document where some sentences are more important than others. A primary requirement is of more importance than a "nice to have" requirement. Also not all jobs are for everybody. A person with 20 years of experience is looking for a senior level job compared to a person with less than 5 years of experience. These distinctions are lost with a "bag of words" search. Job search engines try to camouflage this by trying to go after the title of the job. This works in certain cases but has a high propensity of risk in missing jobs that are good but does not have the words in the title. This problem is more acute in technical fields like IT, Engineering and Sciences where positions are skill oriented. In these fields a person need to have a certain combination of skills to qualify for a job and keyword searching is woefully inadequate in disambiguating and contextualizing the job requirement and the job seekers qualification.
A one click match that gives the job seeker perfect jobs, is the holy grail of job search engines. For this to work, a job seeker need to supply information more than keywords, a resume would be a good starting point. Just like a resume contains all the information for a recruiter to qualify or dis-qualify an applicant, the match technology should be able to qualify or dis-qualify a job based on a resume. The technology should not require the job seeker to answer pages and pages of questions. The technology should then be able to comprehensively match the jobs to the person taking into account the job seeker's preferences like location, salary, seniority, travel etc.
A job search engine to be of importance to job seekers, it should have maximum coverage and a retrieval technology that is a one click match to identify the best jobs quickly and easily. Using technical speak, in information retrieval terms a job search engine should have high precision and recall.
A high precision using a match technology that can cut through pages and pages of results to a list of jobs that will pass through the qualifying criteria of the recruiter. Its not whether a job seeker thinks he/she is qualified for the job, its whether the recruiter thinks that he/she is qualified for the job.
A high recall where increased coverage plus not missing out the relevant jobs, results in a list of jobs than when applied to, will get the job seeker an interview.
After all the objective of a job seeker conducting an online job search is to secure an interview and good job search engines do just that.
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