Opportunity for Social Networking, Reputation Management.

I don't just mean that the job market sucks for people trying to get hired right now, thought that's certainly the case.

• Probably the job market sucks 90% of the time, for either hirers or seekers. That's the Economics Of Scarcity for you.

No, I mean the market doesn't seem very satisfactory to either party. And it's possible by online job boards have actually made it worse, by increasing the quantity of traffic without doing anything filter quality - rather like spam. (Hmmm, I guess there's not enough scarcity!)

Frustrations for job seekers:

• never get feedback

• can't even speak to a human being: "just email us your [CV]"

• can't tell easily how senior a position is: job descriptions are weak and salary information is usually missing

• because the odds are so low you don't want to spend that much time per application

Frustrations for employee seekers:

• overwhelmed with responses, even after tossing the easy rejects (people needing H1 visa or relocation, etc.)

• very hard to filter based on [CV], probably doing a poor job so missing good candidates

• probably do some filtering on arbitrary criteria, like ignoring any application without a cover letter (or rejecting someone for not having a WebLog, or having an AOL email address, or only looking at people who explicitly mention a particular buzzword...).

• even if people write cover letters, it's hard to tell them apart

Ideas for improving the (online) market:

• limit the number of applications a job seeker can submit per week (so they have to pick their favorites)

• force job seekers to rank their applications per week, and show those rankings to the employers

  • I suppose kicking out applications without cover letters is something like this, but a poor proxy

• let applicants pay for additional attention from employers - this could be an auction system like GooGle AdWords.

  • pay some of that fee to the employer, if they provide some feedback to the applicant

• require employers to provide a salary range

• provide templates for job descriptions to help employers do a better job of writing them

• have some employer-community-driven library of questions created for each type of job (boy this would be tricky), have job seekers answer them (since answered would be re-used, applicants could do a better job)

• show applicants how many applications have been submitted for a job already ("ugh, I won't bother")

• show employers how many applications an applicant has submitted (in the past month)

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