How many times have you submitted your resume and a letter for a job online and heard nothing? Would most of the time be accurate? How long did you spend composing that letter and studying the job to do it just right?
Isn’t it time someone did something about it?
Well don’t hold your breath…they still don’t get it. They are still selling features and not benefits. They need to read my favorite article Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt
As a paid user of one of the largest online job sites I was asked to participate in "usability" testing. They showed me lots of nice boxes with statistics, # of new jobs added, # of recruiters doing searches, # of open jobs…and lots of other nice stats. All the stats were in the aggregate and represented averages of all users on their site. How about the "average" user responed to 12 ads and I responed to 6. The average user got 3 responses by responding to 20 ads while I only got 1 response by responding to 10 ads (all these are not real numbers but represent the kind of stats they would be showing)
They wanted to know what I thought and I told them the information would be good as an ad in the New York Times or Wall St. Journal but to me it was meaningless. Lumping all job seekers into one big stat is like setting your compensation goals based on the average US compensation of $43,000 per year. If you are a CEO candidate does that mean you should be happy with anything over $43k?
I suggested that their users (job hunters) really want to know what they need to do to get a job or at least an interview using their service. I suggested that they redesign their site to provide as many resources as possible to guide and help their users answer that question.
Maybe the solution to this problem is to replace the current product managers at the job sites with those that are currently looking…then their employees would know what it’s like to be a job seeker.