| Disclaimer:
the information herein is the personal opinion of
Gilbert Healton.
It does not reflect any official standing of any organization.
Gilbert retains the right to revise, withdraw, or attack his previous ideas at any time without advance noice. |
by Gilbert Healton
2003-06-17 14:12:07 |
Copyright 2002 by Gilbert Healton.
All rights reserved. Contact the author for commercial reproduction rights. |
While this document is biased toward my own job search requirements it should still be useful to many people in computer related fields. While I am a citizen of the United States Of America I do try to pay attention to Internationalization issues. If your profession is well represented on Internet job postings this document should be useful to you.
Sadly I have been one of those high-technical people looking for work since before the fall of the twin towers. Happily my compulsive writing habits tend to leave document trails on subjects not covered well elsewhere and I have followed through on a document I hope will help others in their job searches. You are about to read my personal thoughts and observations on efficient use of the Internet in several job arenas..
Each audience I have written to has their own section, or perhaps sections, in this document. Use the heading to find the sections you are interested in.
Repeating mistakes or problems at computer speeds does not help searches by candidates and recruiters difficult. Both recruiters and searches waste large amounts of time for something this author calls "zombie jobs". All people using the Job lanes of the Internet highway should know about zombie jobs. If I could fix one problem with the Internet job searches, it would be to eliminate what this author calls zombie jobs.
Hopefully I have gathered useful information from other places mixed in with my original ideas and observations. For additional links please visit my web page at:
http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/.jobs.html
Most job banks use job spiders to discover most, if not all, of the jobs listed in the job bank.
A great deal of the jobs on the major search engines are zombie jobs. Perhaps the majority of listings. Responding to zombie jobs is usually a waste for both candidates and recruiters along with a waste of disk space at job banks. Identifying and skipping postings for zombie jobs when searching for jobs is perhaps the biggest trick to saving time for. Recruiters defending their postings against becoming zombies will have many less replies to old postings.
Recipes for creating zombie jobs follow. While the following uses the names of real sites that post zombie jobs these sites were also picked because despite their zombie problems, they remain very useful sites that I frequent on a regular basis.
It's one thing if you are the company posting the job and want to keep a fresh date. But having job banks do this on jobs spidered from other sites seems to be asking for zombie jobs that clutter up your database with information that wastes everyone's time as well as your disk space and bandwidth.
Many recruiters receive vast amounts of E-mail from candidates applying for these zombie jobs. For many recruiters the only defense is to simply delete the applications without any response whatever. All the time and effort put in by the applicant vanishes without a trace. During recessions I suspect there are days the fingers of some recruiters wear out pushing the delete key.
Why "zombie" jobs? Well, badly written UNIX programs can produce "zombie processes" in the computer. These are jobs UNIX is still tracking even though they are dead. Zombie jobs usually stick around forever until the system is rebooted. As I am a UNIX guy the concept of "Zombie jobs" on the Internet came naturally to me.
Worse is when different postings for the same job are written in ways that make job spiders think each description is a new job. Such spiders list the same position, from the same web site, as a new posting with each visit. This adds a lot of clutter to the job listings. This is perhaps the second worse plague for Internet job searchers.
Using dates in the format yyyy-mm-dd on web pages, as in 2002-08-15, month an day always being two-digits long, is strongly suggested by this author. Such dates follow International standards for writing dates (ISO 8601).
Visit http://dmoz.org/Reference/Time/ for many useful links about ISO 8601.
Visit http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/y2k/yrexamples.html for writings from this author on ISO 8601.
New browsers are suggested because the "drill down" to verify a job often requires clicking down several layers as well as the entering of web sites that dirty your browser in strange ways. In the end it may be quite hard, perhaps impossible, to return the browser to the search page. Using a new browser allows you to simply exit the dirty browser when you are done with the site.
Bad web sites may also kill browsers. If only the dirty browser dies you can maintain your position in the larger search.
Other job banks are secretive and don't want you to have links to the places they list. The goal seems to have you do all their business through their web pages. This would be find if they filtered their job listings in better ways to get rid of time wasting garbage. Unfortunately their zombies are as bad as any others. Zombie defense at such "closed sites" requires you to use general Internet search techniques to chase down the company. Sending mail to recruiter@business.com, the look at the http://www.busines.com/ web site. If that doesn't work use general searches, such as Google or telephone searches such as Anywho at http://www.anywho.com/. Such are not accurate for every company, but it is a Wonderful Idea I hope gets better with age.
It is very important to backtrack the job to the original web site offering the job to either the recruiter posting the job or the company itself. Backtracking the posting to yet another job bank is not sufficient. The only way to be sure you are back at the original site is to look at the address in your web browser as some job engines save the original page in their memory. Such snapshots only show the page as it was when it was spidered, and not as the page is now.
Some employment agencies and recruiters contract with a particular job bank to host their job listings rather than maintaining them on their own servers. Decent job search software is complex and having another company maintain it allows recruiters to dedicate their resources to recruiting. Going to the company home page to drill down to career opportunities will drop you into the job bank dedicated to that company. Such job bank postings can be considered to be the original postings.
The key to spotting duplicate jobs is noticing job listings posted within a few days of each other whose descriptions are virtually identical to each other. Applicants may still wish to submit themselves to both recruiters while taking particular care that only one recruiter will submit them to the actual company (the first one to offer wins!) The hazard is that having two or more submittals from recruiters is a sure way to ensure you do not get the job as hiring companies don't want different recruiters arguing over fees if you are hired. Companies tend to shy away from going with either recruiter to avoid court battles.
yahoo.com
may make people wonder about what type of job you are
applying for.
Internet job sites often generate their own reference numbers. Unless the recruiter is actually using that site to hold their official jobs this is not a good number to include in your reply.
Including a web address to the original job posting, on the recruiter's official web site, can help the recruiter find the job in question.
Identity theft, and its potentially dangerous outcomes, is a serious, and growing, threat. It is so easy to do, and so difficult to recover from.
Never ever publish very private information, such as social security numbers, the size of your family, and if you are single (sadly, especially single women). Even things like the number of children can draw the attention of undesirable people.
- Job Banks
- Personal Web Page
- Resume Blasting Services
- Internet news groups
Many job bank resumes are key word oriented. Getting all the important keywords into your resume as often as you can is important.
The reason personal web pages are so important is it takes spiders several months to find your web page during general searching. In order for spiders to find your web page multiple other web sites the spiders already know, or can find, must hyperlink to your web pages. There are also free posting services, such as http://www.ineedhits.com/, that can post your web site. In times of sudden need it is nice to have already been found.
Having something on your web tree that attracts a good number of hits each month helps raise your priority with some search engines. The subject can be hobby, professional, or other interests. Using the <META...> tags in HTML also helps some spiders better catalogue your pages. If you don't know META tags, talk to a friend that does.
If you don't want to appear to be looking for a job, but still want to have your resume found by search engines, several tricks are available.
- Post a web pages with only a "Not currently looking" message on it, but use <META > tags to list all key words.
- To do even better, force a font color that matches your background color to make text invisible on most browsers. Then list the key words, perhaps the entire resume. Anyone calling up the web page for casual inspection will only see a "not currently looking" message.
- If you have standard footers on your web pages, put the hidden text below the footers to obscure it even more.
These newsgroup posts need to use neat ASCII text as they do not take well attachments, images, pictures, Microsoft Word documents, etc. If at all. Job seekers should only occasionally post to the news groups.
Read the FAQ for the news group (Frequently Asked Questions) before posting to any newsgroup. Always following the posting guidelines if you want respect.. Reading the news group FAQs may prove helpful before beginning to build your personal web page.
Talk to your local system administrator or ISP about connecting to the news groups. If you have a blind E-mail address somewhere posting to news groups can be a very anonymous way of publicly posting your resume on the Internet.
All web sites need to do is have one character change on them to be "fresh". Delete or add a comma. Move two skills around in your skill list. Any old change works as long as something other than "white space" changes (white space is the space between words, at the end of lines, and between lines). Changing your resumes once each week or two seems to be the popular recommendation.
If you simply save the old resume again, without changing anything on it, some places will notice nothing really changed and leave you at the old priority. Some may be smart enough to throw away only changes to white space (any I wrote would be!).
Then there are the archive sites such as http://www.archive.org/ that intentionally remember old web pages so users can surf the web the way it was. Dishonest spiders find old sites this way... And anyone can review the way your site was in the future.
The moral of this story is any place your name, and other information, appears on web pages, address books, and more, will be remembered long after you whish it was gone.
Your checking should include the following Internet tests:
If Uwhois does not work, try InterNIC at http://www.internic.net/whois.html and do a "domain" search on the main domain name. This is know as a "who is" search. For country code domains (two-character name at end of URL), visit http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm to pick your country and drill down to a whois search.
With all of the words: "George Smith"Do another search without the recruiters name (George Smith). Also note, the search should not use more than 10 words, including words in quotes.
With at least one of the words: "Jobs For You" jobsforyou.com
Domain [Don't] return results from the site or domain jobsforyou.com
Information providing very important identifiers, such as job id and a verification web hyperlink address, should be repeated in the main description of your job listings. Some spiders discard headings they do not understand. This results in information vital to preventing zombies, or recognizing those that get started, much more difficult. Having this information duplicated in descriptions makes it more likely even badly written spiders will keep it. Including such redundant information in paragraphs providing regular description text help to improve the chances preserving this critical information.
People want to find details about potential jobs. If you have many jobs some type of search engine would be very helpful.
Spiders work best with plain web pages. If these pages are organized by so people can drill down into them by job type, so much the better. "Plain" pages are web pages that are both fairly simple in their design and are accessed by simple links without the use of forms, Flash, Java, JavaScript, or any thing else that tends to block spiders.
If web listings of your openings are provided by an outside hosting service, then have easy to find links to that hosting service on your web site. Having a link that returns "all jobs" is vital for proper spidering.
The following shows two titles for the second job. The second one will attract more of the talent you are looking for.
senior developer, Difficult Staffing, New York, NY
Sr. Developer, Manhattan, UNIX, perl
Help on writing good titles follows...
When writing one-line job titles attracting people with the desired talents is your goal. Think of writing talent bait, not English sentences. You are not seeking good grades from your old English teacher but responses from good people. Prioritize the information in the line so the most important requirements or qualifications come first.
A very short job title (e.g., developer, administrator, Electrical Engineer) followed by the key requirements of the job are recommended. Industry standard abbreviations may be freely used in titles. The goal is to allow titles to be quickly read yet strongly draw attention of the desired people.
If you must identify your company in the posting, put it last and keep it very short.
Note that formal job titles are intentionally being avoided. Many industries have job titles too vague to be practical. Titles like "Organic Chemist" and "Software Engineer" provide no real information about the job. Unless the job title is unusually specific (Kindergarten Teacher) effective titles need details on what is being done rather than what Human Resources calls it.
Use conventional paragraph breaks (<P>). If you use some type of fancy break the spiders may not see it and put much, if not all, of your posting into a single sentence. Such are very hard for candidates to read.
DO NOT USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. SUCH IS CALLED "SHOUTING" AND LARGE AMOUNTS OF IT IS CONSIDERED RUDE. MOST PEOPLE ALSO SUCH PARAGRAPHS MUCH HARDER TO READ. USE ITALIC AND BOLD TO EMPHASIZE WORDS. BULLET LISTS AND VERTICAL WHITE SPACE IS ALSO NICE. ALL CAPITAL LETTERS GOES BACK TO THE DARK AGES OF COMPUTER PRINTERS WITHOUT LOWER CASE LETTERS, AND EVEN TYPEWRITTERS. TO SERIOUS COMPUTER USERS IT REEKS OF NAIVETE.
When writing web pages make it easy to read on the screen. Spending too much effort on making printouts look nice can be counterproductive.
As a job seeker I have given up searching requirements fields, or job description fields for this very reason. Full body searches are the only reliable way to go, yet many seekers only search the shorter fields and miss a lot of jobs.
Job postings not properly scanned by spiders are not properly shown to the Internet at large. To ensure your postings are widely distributed follow KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Using creative keywords or ways of describing your job to catch the attention of readers may greatly reduce the number of people reading you posting if the job spiders don't properly catalog it. If you want to be fancy one place, KISS up in another location.
Another popular format is to have a "keyword", colon, then a description.
Job description:
A description of the job.
Use a paragraph break (<P>) before the keyword to get extra spacing above the keyword. Use a simple line break (<BR>) between the keyword and the next line, if you want a break.
However you format the posting, be consistent throughout the entire posting.
When searching for jobs with search engines many engines return summaries of the job by including the opening paragraphs of the posting. Having nothing but "standard garbage" in search results makes things difficult on your potential applicants. And this decreases the number of people that take the time to drill down to the details needed to make decisions.
Popular keywords follow in alphabetic order of the main keyword. You should tend to order them by importance to your posting. Obmit headings you really don't need. This author believes headings shown in bold should always be present.
| Area Code: | Telephone area code. But remember it is useless in states like New Mexico that have one area code for the entire state. | Company: | Name of the company or organization posting the job opening. If you are a recruiter it may help if you end it with "(recruiter)". |
| Title: | A one-line heading. Rather than using an English sentence here a short list of the more important requirements may be more effective at describing what you want. More information on titles can be found in 5.4, Nicely Written Job Title Lines. Readers may find more information in the Description and Requirements sections. |
| Position: | The actual title of the position, as Human Resources and the rest of the industry call it. This should appear early in your detailed description. Likely before the detailed description. |
| Description: | A longer, detailed, description of the job. |
| Education: | What level of education is absolutely required. Is there an "or equivalent" option given to people with long established track records? Remember some people have been in industries before degrees were available in the field. Phrases like "fifteen years of professional experience may be substituted for a degree" can attract these experienced people. |
| Job ID: | Some code uniquely identifying the job.
This is somewhat useful to people and enormously useful
in helping spiders catalogue your postings.
The most useful IDs are all one word, start with letters, and contain only letters and numeric digits. This makes ids look like words that regular search engines can search for. Hopefully your website provides a "find job by job id" feature or simply allows the job id to be found by your local search engine as with other keywords. |
| Length: | Length of contract jobs. You may omit or enter "n/a" for full time postings. |
| Location: | A description of the job location that is accurate enough to give potential applicants an idea of the commute time to the job. For states with area codes that cover smaller areas this may include phrases like "Area code 212". Stating the county can also help.
Include the nation the work site is in, even if it is obvious to people. to help job spiders reading your web site. A direct hiring company may put their complete address if desired. Zip code and area code locations should have their own keyword, likely immediately after "Location:", as these are two keys job spiders often look for. |
| Rate or Pay Rate: | Pay scale. Low, high, and any bonuses are one way.
$80,000 - 120,000 + Bonuses Another is to state the minimum salary: $80,000+. |
| Responsibilities: | A description of what the job will entail. |
| Required Skills or Qualifications: | A detailed list of the required skills,
experience, knowledge, industries, etc., that without which
applicants will not make the first cut.
Using bulleted lists can be nice here as it makes each point stand out. It also makes each point easier for job spiders to find and catalogue. Making this list easy for job spiders to read is important as most people searching for jobs use keywords. If you do not use bulleted lists, be sure to separate listings with commas or semi-colons to help mark each point. Remember, dumb job spiders must be able to separate out the requirements. Absolutely vital requirements should also be in the title line. They may be cryptic, but there. The line should be limited to 60, maybe 70 characters, including spaces, periods, commas, etc. You may condense things by omitting spaces after commas. Requirements includes any industry requirements. If you only accept candidates with five years of financial experience, then at least put "finance" or "finance+5" in the title. If a specific area of and industry is desired use that in the title ("bonds") rather than the general term. |
| Preferred Skills or Qualifications: | Skills that are desired, but not absolutely required. Strongly preferred skills may wind up at the end of the title line. |
| Tax Term: | Describes how this job will work. full-time, consultant w2, corp-to-corp, 1099, etc. |
| Date Expires: | Date the job posting is expected to expire.
Pick a date that is the expected close date.
You can always extend it if needed later on.
While not many spiders look for this right now, my hope is that if expiration dates get popular spiders will start looking for them and, when the expiration date hits, go back to verify the job is still open. Even without such spiders it will help regular people become aware that this may be a zombie job. |
| Date Posted: | Date the job was originally posted on your web site. |
| Verify Job: (a.k.a. Original Posting) | This is a hyperlink to the job posting on your
own web site. If there is any one way to fight zombie
jobs,
both by applicants reading jobs and spiders looking
for jobs, this is it.
If the job is not there it would be wonderful if your web server was smart enough to indicate "position closed". This author favors "Verify Position" over "Original Posting" as "verify" sounds more in the self interest of readers than "original" and is more likely to be used by readers. This use allows your web server to better track where your effective job postings are being distributed. |
| Travel: | Some hint of any travel required for the job. "none", "rare", "local", or some percentage, are possible values. |
To this end, having a simply formatted job posting
The following can be important to include in your text:
These newsgroup posts need to use neat ASCII text as they do not take well attachments, images, pictures, Microsoft Word documents, etc. If at all.
Read the FAQ for the news group (Frequently Asked Questions) before posting to any newsgroup. Always following the posting guidelines if you want respect.. Before posting anything on newsgroups recruiters are advised to search the groups to see if the job banks listing their jobs, especially any they subscribe to, have already posted their jobs to the news groups. If not recruiters may be well served by just posting their priority jobs, with links to their static job listings (see section 6.4, Static Listings) for spiders to find. Spiders should find the links to the static job page and take it from there.
Talk to your local system administrator or ISP about connecting to the news groups.
E-mail that looks like it might be valid is usually kept of rejected by what is is the first screen of the message.
If your message looks like spam pollution it may well be treated like poison. Deleted without being read.
And think about it... people who seriously use the Internet as well as working with computers on their job may be just the type of people you want to reach. So...
Xyz Consulting is a leader in the field of...
DELETE! Nearly every company claims to be a leader in something.Xyz Consulting provides excellent benefits
DELETE! Every serious high-tech job has some benefits.Xyz Consulting has over $$$$$$
DELETE!
Who cares? Do you have a job that matches my skills?
If you are E-mailing a job position to some one, if there is a deadline for submitting resumes, include the deadline in the E-mail.
Further static job listings on this page must allow other spiders to post the jobs if you desire the widest distribution of your postings.
If your postings are being mangled, and job banks often mangle your pages at least a little, look at postings from other companies in the same job bank. If every posting is being mangled do not feel bad as it is the job banks problem. But if only your jobs are mangled, you better do some research on why your pages are different from other posters.
Also look at your web pages using different browsers. Different browsers treat the same pages differently so using only the browser on your desktop to review your web pages makes you blind to what many people will see. Some services, such as http://www.netmechanic.com/ not only validate your web pages to be sure the technical details are correct, they can also quickly show you what your web page looks like on different browsers. This becomes more helpful when posting computer jobs for people that use operating systems other than Microsoft Windows®.
In addition to this section webmasters really should read section 5, Immediate Tips For Recruiters.
Many of the suggestions involve ideas that help defend against zombies.
(unix OR linux OR solaris OR sunos OR aix) and (c OR c++ OR perl OR dhtml OR html OR web OR sql)
When posting jobs for computer programmers, or other people that use "logic" in their jobs, you should really let them use it on your web site.
The web address (URL) to this final job posting should not be some long and ugly thing that can only be obtained from a search engine. Each posting should include an "Validate Job:" links that contains the URL to the web page listing the job. If another labels is used included text along the lines of "verify the job is still open before responding." For shorter versions "verify job" may work. On your on web site the link would be toward the same page. This helps reduce people responding to closed jobs when people respond to old copies in job banks.
It would be wonderful if attempts to view closed jobs returned an appropriate message to the visitor. Another idea: if your web server notices a reference to your job page from your job page it could give a special "position is still open" response rather than repeating the same information.
http://www.yourdoman.here/cgi-bin/view?job-number
Have you ever spent a long time exploring a site, saving a few book marks for the pages you want to come back to, only to find the book marks take you to the top level home page? You then have to drill down all over again to get the desired information, if you can remember how you got there. This problem is brought to you by unimaginative use of frames.
Some sites providing reverse phone listings can also provide the URL to your corporate home page. If the phone listing provider knows all of your published corporation phone numbers, people with just the phone number can obtain the URL by a reverse search.
A major player on the Internet providing both phone numbers and URLs is http://www.anywho.com by AT&T.
This allows candidates to strike you off their list of companies they are expecting replies from.
There are two defenses against this. First is ensuring your job listings only appear from cgi-bins or other web pages built dymanically based on form submissions. This is perhaps the best defense.
The second defense is to have a robots.txt file that blocks spiders from your job listings. As the names of job spider domains is always changing it is not practical to block just job spiders. Yet blocking all spiders makes your jobs unavailable to standard search engines, such as Google.
On the other side or the coin, actively determine the web addresses of other job banks and teach your spiders to stay away from them. Considering the high incidences of zombie and duplicated jobs in many job banks, spidering your competitors may not increase your listings in a useful way. Rather it may contaminate your job listings with many zombie and duplicated listings.
If using the Last-Modified dates, where available, is important, compare them against the current Date in the header. If they are the same, or within minutes of being the same, it is unlikely the date can be trusted. Any web servers reporting the date of the latest change to the information on the page will have useful dates in them.
Before archiving an original URL you sould verify that it truly calls up the original job if you repeat it. Running this test from a different IP address would be nice to defeat any special caching in your local systems or on the spidered server.
If you are one of those sites that can not stand the thought of exposing web contact information to your readers, at least internally test the results for your readers to ensure the expected job is still in the response. You can then reply with a "job appears open" reply, even providing an "as of" date from the any date header received from the responding system.
Each job posting should have some magic words near the top of the posting. The following proposals are already Internet standards for newsgroups.
misc.jobs.contract Contract jobs misc.jobs.offered Actual W2 job posting misc.jobs.offered.entry W2 entry level jobs. misc.jobs.resumes Resumes by people looking for job. Should include "Resume for ...." or "CV for ..." depending on what it is. .
The case of the letters herein would not be significant. These should be enclosed in some type of (parenthesis), {curly braces}, or [square brackets]. An alternative is to use a heading of "Posting Type".
This would clearly identify if the posting is a resume or job posting. Job spiders would love it if this got popular.Posting Type: misc.jobs.resumes
Additional information may follow this keyword either under their own heading or within () parenthesis. Any HTML commands within may be safely ignored by robots or other programs scanning the text. The misc.jobs.xxxx heading must not have HTML commands embedded in it to make it easier for robots and other programs to spot. The idea is to have job banks and job search engines pick up these keywords to include them in their listings.
posted=yyyy-mm-dd post date, in standard international format (ISO 8601). expires=yyyy-mm-dd Date job posting should be considered dead. If necessary you may renew the listing on, or a few days before, this date (overlaps helps keep listing alive). id=your internal ID Your internal id for this job (no embedded spaces). If there is a company wide id, use that. Else use your initials, extension, etc., followed by some unique number, for the position. Any reposting of the position would continue to use the same id. If multiple positions are open, separate them by commas (again, no spaces within). You may hyperlink each position to your job site to allow candidates to quickly verify the position and see the latest details.
Multiple keywords would be separated by white space characters in the HTML file, which does not include escapes.
If having such on your pages offends someone, place these within an <-- comment --> so it does not appear on the page.
Only people interesting in helping this project should read on.
Has anyone else already done something like this?
This section is not complete or finished in any way. It is still a very rough draft.
The current concept provides a rating of 1 through 5 to the reader even though the actual scoring uses a number of 0 to 100 for each point (well, maybe 0 through 10).
Any ratings for job sites should include at least the following:
Before declaring a posting mangled you need to chase back to the original web site to see if the original looks mangled or not. Some original posters do not know how to write useful web pages.
NOTES FOR FUTURE: Registration: 0=must have paying subscription to use. 1=must register to use, but registration is free. Nothing special remembered. 2=will remember some of your search criteria w/o paying for subscription 5=no registration is needed. Jobs: number of jobs on-line Search; 0=no online search. 1=minimal search (all AND or OR). 2=AND and OR.or Boolean w/o parentheses 3=AND and OR with parentheses 4=full Boolean with parentheses, NOT, etc. Results: description returned 0=job title only 1=full text only 2=job title and some text 2=select job return level Results: sort 0=no sorting 1=sort by match quality 2=sort by post date 3=user selects sort by at least match quality and post date.
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