Grab our Linux Kernel Developer Job Market Widget

Over the next few years, Job-Market widgets will replace traditional job boards. There are good reasons for this. There are several problems with a traditional job board. A job posting will have lots of key words, if you match any of those key words, you will see the posting. A linux friend of mine was complaining that all these windows shops would post jobs, mentioning linux. When he did a search for linux jobs he was completely spammed by windows jobs. He much preferred our specialty linux job markets. Worse yet, if he applied to one of those windows jobs, as some linux people do, the hiring manager gets spammed. Now they have to spend a lot of time sorting through spam resumes, possibly missing the good one. Furthermore the only people visiting job boards are the active job seekers, and the HR professionals want to find the passive candidates. Finally if you post an email address on a simple job board like craigslist, you will get spam from all over the world. I knew a guy who wrote software to email out his resume to all software jobs on Monster. He got a job quickly, but I have no idea many spam resumes he generated. Good thing he did not open source his software. There has to be a better solution!

There is a better solution. The people you are looking for hang out on several different known professional websites. Let us harvest resumes from the visitors to those web sites. They will be the candidates you are looking for. There will not be any spam resumes in that collection. And because it is a well defined technical niche, it is easy to ask a few questions to qualify their years of experience in that industry. We can ask them their citizenship and current location to make sure that you do not get spammed by people without a work permit. Finally we have a real live person reviewing their credentials and talking to them to make sure they would fit into your environment.

Technically how do we do this? The simple approach is to take one of our post resume widgets and pay to host it on the websites where your target candidates spend a lot of time. The active and the passive candidates will both see it. The active candidates will post their resume, and even some of the passive candidates will post their resume. Furthermore, we store their resumes in a specialty job board for years. All they have to do, is look for a new job once in several years, and we have their resume and contact information. Over time, we get to know them, we document our conversations with them, we write down what hiring managers thought of them. We develop a rich picture and understanding of who that candidate is.

So what are widgets? Widgets are small html and javascript fragments, which someone else installs on their web server. We have a post jobs widget and a list jobs widget. I am embarrassed to say we do not yet have the critical post resume widget. I wrote the wrong one first. Give me a few days. If you really need it I will have it written in a day. Using our widgets, the users of a technical web site can easily post their resume, but it is safely stored in our database. We review it, and if the candidate fits your requirements, we submit the pre-qualified candidate to you, and set up the phone screens and live interviews. Welcome to Web 2.0 for recruiting.

So what do the widgets look like? On the top left hand side of the page you can see the widget. Go test it out. Use the drop down menu bar to see all the options. It is quite easy to use css to completely change the appearance of the widget, making it look native to the website where it is hosted. We are happy to make any other needed changes to these widgets.

It is very easy to use our widgets. Any web site administrator can grab the html fragment, post it on their website, and the jobs will appear. They can copy over the css file, and customize the appearance to their heart's content. They can even just edit the html. It is quite simple. They can select which of our job boards are appropriate for their users. Here is the Post Job Widget, here are a few lines of HTML and javascript for them to add to their site.

What if we do not have a job board for your specialty requirement? If you are interested in a specialty for which we do not yet have a job board, just let us know and we will put up one or more specialty job markets in your field of interest. I literally have a list of 300 job boards I want to create. It only takes 10 minutes to put up a new job board. Of course creating a job board is easy, the difficult thing is getting the traffic. That is why it is important to host these widgets on the correct websites, and to pay for that exposure in order to bring in the candidates you are seeking.

How robust is this? The job boards and recruiting process are both old and robust. The widgets are brand new, call them Beta software. While I know that this is a white hot area, I do not yet have a solid track record. The good news is that any bugs or problems you report should get fixed within a day.

Conclusion So what have we learned? Traditional job boards are filled with spam, but are missing passive candidates. Those passive candidates are all hard at work, keeping up with their profession on professional web sites. We need to put our post-resume widgets there to find them, and then phone screen them in order to present you with a well qualified candidate in a time-efficient manner.