Monday, March 19, 2012

Careerbuilder.com Update Broke My Job Search

Yep, it's another tech post.

See here's the deal.  Everyone who 'owns' a website is always looking for ways to refresh it so people find more reasons to come back.  More visits mean you're more likely to click on an ad and send a few pennies to a few dollars their way.

Sometimes the refresh works, other times they need to go back and rethink it.   This is one of those times.

This is also a good illustration of why I put "User Experience" and "User Interface" on my resume.  I've written about how Dice.com made a change, why it was wrong and what they needed to do to fix it.  They hit that blog posting and decided I was right on some points, and used my ideas.   I'm sure they read it because they're out in Iowa and nobody from that city had ever read my blog before that posting.  It was easy to find.

A little background and high order discussion. I'll try not to get too "techie".  In fact, I pride myself and have been told I'm successful in writing about weird tech issues and getting things across to people who don't understand them.

I look for permanent work around 35 hours a week on average.  I use the major job boards and some of the minor ones to ask the question "What Jobs Are Available within 30 Miles of Zipcode 33305 in Computing Within The Last Three Days".  You know, IT and Project Management.   Since I live in a major city, that search returns a lot of positions.  I further finesse that by saying search for specific job titles, certain exclusions of companies that are inappropriate for various reasons, and even some arbitrary things.

Once a week I have a similar search that is targeted at specific companies and all of the cities and towns in my county and a few neighboring cities that I know about.

Pretty straightforward, there are millions who are unemployed, underemployed, looking for permanent positions, and just curious that go through similar processes every day.

This process can be called "Data Analysis" or "Data Mining".  You do the same thing every time you use a spreadsheet.   

One reason why I prefer www.dice.com to all the other sites is that it further categorizes things as to whether it is a "Direct Hire" which is a company vs a "recruiter" which typically is just reposting a position that a Direct Hire had posted the day before.  Needless to say, I know which recruiters to skip.  If they have a "hot deal" they'll call me with the position and most likely I've already made my judgement as to whether to pass or not.  We'll talk but usually they realize I've been there, done that, and moved on.

You can see from this picture that everything that I need to see is presented on one line.  Dice.com has successfully reduced things down to just the information you need to decide whether a position is worth looking at further.

Basically I've managed to use Dice in a fashion that is slightly inconsistent with their website.  I save each individual page as a link so that I don't have to click onto the next page.  Each page is it's own link in a folder in Firefox and I can look at each page in it's own tab. 

When you are opening 150 pages a day, you want to save every last second you can.

The list is presented in Job Alphabetical Order, all jobs are within the last three days, and I can tell at a glance whether I need to pursue looking at a link.

By the way, a helpful hint.  If you are looking at a webpage, hold down the Ctrl key and click on the link and it will open in another tab.  You can do that many times, and look at all those links later.  It saves a lot of time!

That's the biggest criteria about this.  Saving time.  Can you imagine doing this by hand in a newspaper? 

Now here's what happened with www.Careerbuilder.com

Careerbuilder is a little different.  They're big and they partner with many newspapers around the world.  You're going to hit one of their sites if you are looking at a branded website for many organizations.  It also has a few quirks.

One is that no matter how hard I tried, I can't get it to give me more than 25 positions at a time.  That forces me to open up as many as 20 links for a given criteria.

Their sort is semi-broken.  If I have more than one job type on a given link, it's going to put a few jobs from "today" at the tail end of the search.  When you are looking at 400 jobs for that criteria, that means you have to load up 20 pages just to get to the tail end. 

Now that you're committed to opening all those pages in tabs, you have to consider what you want to look at.  If you're looking at this thing every day, you don't need to look at three days worth, you can skip to the end.  Check for "Today" and "Yesterday".  Today, in a list of 20 opened tabs, Today and Yesterday were pages 1 and 2 and part of 3 then again in page 20.  That's a lot of extra page hits for no good reason.

This screen grab from Careerbuilder.com illustrates how just a few little problems break the page and make it more difficult to get to the information you are looking for.

They used to have a handy page number at the top of each listing.  Minor perhaps, but knowing you are on page 4 of 20 and looking at positions 76 through 100 is surprisingly helpful.  After all, you expect to have to skip ahead to the Next To The Last Page, so you need to know where you are at.  

The date is not shown, but it is implied by saying "posted today" and "posted yesterday" all in grey lower case text.  I can handle the grey, but the date would be more useful since it is more compact.  I would prefer to see the date as "Mar. 18".  The year can be implied, we all make the same mistakes on our checks but by March or even the second week of January, the mental block against the year has been past.

Most importantly they slid all of the position specific information into a single column.

Position Name
Company Name
City Name

Position Name
Company Name
City Name

... is not as helpful as stringing it out in one line.



Position Name     Company Name     City Name   Date
Position Name     Company Name     City Name   Date
Position Name     Company Name     City Name   Date

The reasoning is that if you're skimming through 400 positions for a given search, you need to be able to skim the column and check on position name first.   Ctrl+Click to open that position into a new tab and continue onwards.


That brings up another point.  The order it is presented is incorrect and there is no way to specify which column you're sorting on - and you need more than one column.   The job name should be the most important order.  Ideally this should be Sorted first by Date, then Job Name.   What the result would be is now that you have all the "Business Analyst" positions sorted together for "today" and not mixed in with the "Data Analyst" positions.  They are similar but distinct disciplines and while many of the skills are similar, they don't completely overlap.

After all they have different position names don't they?

Luckily they have the position names all in blue and the rest of the text in other colors so with a mind trick I can try to turn off the rest of the info until I need it...

When you redesign a website as complex as Careerbuilder, you are trying to balance a lot of needs.  You don't want to do a radical redesign because it will get so alien to people that their minds will switch off.   It needs to be evolutionary.   Things as minor as the list of pages you are on will be noticed especially if you're skipping to the end of 20 pages and can't get to page 19 unless you go to page 20 first like I did the other day.

Basically the information is all there - Content gets an A Grade.
Presentation?  You can do better.  C Minus perhaps. 

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