New Features on the Resumes2Work Career Website

By Dean W. Johnson

Reasons to create the site

As recruiters we were among the first to embrace the Internet and in that capacity we made use of several career websites. Through the years we have seen in them much of what we liked and much of what we didn't like. So back in 2001 when most of the large job boards priced themselves out of the market for most of the recruiting shops we knew, we decided to create our own database driven recruiting website. We could then attract more applicants for our own job orders and maintain records of our own job orders and applicants. It is a starting point for wider distribution of our applicants and job orders. We offered it to other recruiting and hiring organizations in order to grow.

Design Philosophies

In designing our site we wanted to incorporate what we learned from our likes and dislikes of other sites.

For example, the traditional sites were typically designed and coded by young programmers unaware of what affect their designs might have on the process. The insistence of some upon using numerical data for salaries in job orders was a big annoyance as sometimes the salary information was an explanation like "Depending On Experience" or "DOE". The design created inflexibility and assumed that arithmetic would be used on the data. So our web site would store applicant resumes and job orders in strictly text format. We tried to give as much information as possible to make the job orders and resumes searchable and distinct while allowing for the greatest flexibility of information.

Searching for Job Orders and Resumes

We allow everyone to search our job orders. You don't even have to log in. We allow Employers and Recruiters to post as many job orders as they like. Unlike some sites we do not limit the size of a job order. In addition, in order to promote the use of resumes as a tool to sell the applicant on a particular job order, we encourage our applicants to store as many versions of their resumes as they wish. They are not limited to just one or two resumes. This way an applicant can customize a resume's keyword content to match that of a particular job order for each job order that interests them enhancing their chances of being considered.

Employers and Recruiters can do a resume search by searching on our applicant's resumes after they have submitted just one job order.

Applicants with multiple resumes will come up more often with a more diverse keyword mix in those several resumes. This helps both the hiring authority and the job seeker. Job seekers should customize their resumes for each job they apply for and they should be sure that the skills, tools and activities asked for in the job they apply for are thoroughly discussed in the Employment Section of the resume.

Here's at tip Skill summaries in resumes are ignored by hiring authorities as hype.

Employment Message Board

We've incorporated a discussion board on our site to allow for discussion of job searching and who's hiring and where there is hiring, etc. In that way Applicants can exchange tips.

The Evolution of Features

Over time we have grown from a few thousand job orders to a few tens of thousand job orders and traffic levels that are almost respectable and are still growing.

Our site is becoming more sophisticated. Our search engine was simple at first, relying on text searches supported by the database engine or just a linear search, but in time that bogged down our server and we had to write a proper database driven search engine with word dictionaries, and mask words and the like. We now have one of the fastest job search engines out there, often out performing Dice and Monster.

One of the things our users have been asking for has been a Job Alert system, allowing them to be notified when a job order comes into the system that matches their search criteria. Many of these on other sites give out many more false positives than they should, so we wanted ours to be more controllable and reliable. Ours is based upon our search engine and has essentially the same user interface. You give it keywords, locations and categories and the job orders are sent by email daily, weekly or monthly, your choice.

Blogs

Also, to enhance our job order distribution we have produced blogs. These XML feeds of the RSS format are a relatively new thing. Our job orders are organized into RSS Feed format, an XML type format, and can be read by RSS readers that can reside on the desktops of users. As new job orders come into the site, the users are notified. These feeds are rather large and thus have been broken down by category and are limited to just the newest job orders due to the limitations of some of the popular readers and validators. We have two methods, one real-time from the database and the other relying on XML files. Some syndicators prefer the XML file variety while we of course prefer the real-time feeds. Check them out at:

http://www.resumes2work.com/rssfeedjobcat.php

and

http://www.resumes2work.com/rssfeedjobst.php .

Be sure to get yourself a reader and there are several links on the page to facilitate that.

 Several Methods to Search Job Orders

We have been working to increase our content by offering our job orders acquired by several methods. Of course an applicant, or anyone else for that matter, can do a search by keyword, category and/or location from our search engine. In addition all the job orders of a particular category can be shown directly by clicking a link on the page. If you want to see all of our Information Systems job orders you can just click on that link. There are 32 categories. We also have a page for all of our North American Locations.