True Love, Job Recruitment Style
Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help pioneer commerce on the Internet. You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary. Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers. Must be willing to relocate to the Seattle area (we will help cover moving costs). Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership.
Send resume and cover letter to Jeff Bezos: mail: be…@netcom.com fax: 206/828-0951 US mail: Cadabra, Inc. 10704 N.E. 28th St. Bellevue, WA 98004 We are an equal opportunity employer.
This message was written in 1994. Since then, very little about job advertising has changed.
The small shops and Monsters alike of the job search industry have relied heavily on the same techniques that have affected online advertising at large. They are, in reverse chronological order of market saturation:
- Social Matching
This is the new, exciting frontier of the job search market. Whereas the strong and weak connections of social capital have long played a crucial role in the job market, the formation of an explicit social graph has allowed for Facebook and LinkedIn to incorporate social capital into their targeting mechanisms for presenting job opportunities.
I’ve been getting this ad for Designer jobs at Facebook for the last couple of weeks:
I’m guessing that I was targeted for this ad because I’m a fan of F8 and some developer topic pages and groups. Presumably, more fine-grained social information could also be used for targeting of this sort.
- Contextual Matching
By collecting information about publishers and readers, advertising networks match up ads to content, resulting in plenty of terrible juxtapositions, like this one:
Whether its news about contextual ads in video games, or the creator of Family Guy signing on to distribute via Adsense, contextual advertising is still making headlines, despite the technique being almost a decade old.
- Simple Keyword Matching
Keyword matching is the 800-lb gorilla of job search sites, and it’s been the predominant technique since the birth of the web. If you go to any destination job search site, such as Indeed, you’ll still be greeted with the familiar blank white search box.
Same goes for Craigslist, and any commercial search engine. If you’re interested in a job related to “Hadoop”, just search for it, or setup an alert for your keywords. That way, recruiters can find contractors or new employees interested in relevant topics, and everyone is happy, right?
Well, not exactly.
- Trust Issues
Having posted for some specific programming gigs on Craigslist, I know about the huge volume of responses, and the high level of noise.
In my experience, I’ve found that posting a lot of detail about what I’m looking for, strangely enough, can be a really bad idea. Just as keywords can be useful for finding a job where you have a related proficiency - like the Hadoop example, keywords are also useful for feigning proficiency. So you want to pay me $40/h for using Hadoop? As soon as I learn some minimal basics about what Hadoop is, I can send you a confident message about my experiences with it.
And therein lies the problem with the typical job description, transparently listing everything you seek. There are too many bad actors out there, resulting in a follow-up process with too many false leads, and too much of a necessity for the type of prolonged due diligence that is a great way of losing the people who actually are proficient.
So what are job sites to do, instead of transparently listing keywords?
Luckily for them, successful dating sites have already solved this problem.
