Meta-Job Search Tool Evaluation Tool Evaluated:  JobSniper
Beth Kniss, Insala Vice President of Research & Development

With thousands of job boards on the Internet, and millions of employer websites often posting job opportunities, are there ways to quickly find large numbers of jobs to match a specific set of criteria?

This question is the core of a multi-part research study being conducted by Insala's Research Team. We will be evaluating a number of "meta-job search tools" and sharing the results over the next few issues of our InfoLink Newsletter. Our first evaluation is the JobSniper meta-job search tool.

Meta-Job Search Tools - What are they?

There currently is no one tool that "crawls" the entire Internet to find every job opportunity available to match a set of criteria. There are, however, a handful of "meta-job search tools" which do attempt to source jobs from multiple locations. These tools typically search a selected number of job boards at one time (many of them are the large, well known job boards). So a job-seeker can visit one of these tools, enter their job search criteria and run one search that goes through many websites at one time and returns the jobs found in one centralized search. Conceptually, this saves the individual from having to visit many different sites to find jobs.

An overview of our findings for the Meta-Job Search Tool JobSniper:

A sample search for an "accountant" job in Boston was run through the meta-job search tool, JobSniper. The exact same search was then re-run through each of the job boards directly.

Question Findings
Do meta-job search tools actually find all of the available matching jobs that exist on the job boards they search? Or do they miss some? For JobSniper - Yes.

When running a sample job search, we found JobSniper returned approximately the same number of job matches (946) as the search through each job board directly (744). JobSniper actually returned a larger number since two of the sites (Boston Works and HotJobs) returned jobs from the greater Boston area, whereas when the searches were run through these two sites directly, the returned jobs were specifically in Boston proper.
Do meta-job search tools actually return valid matches (jobs that meet the criteria entered); or do they return large numbers of jobs that don't actually meet the criteria? For JobSniper - it returns just as many accurate job matches as the job boards themselves.

JobSniper had virtually the same accuracy percentage (39%) as the job boards themselves (38%). Restated, 39% of the jobs found through JobSniper actually matched the search criteria entered - so 4 in 10 jobs were matches. Running the same searches through the job boards directly did not produce any better job matches.
Do job-seekers actually get more and better matches by visiting the job boards directly (which takes more time)? For JobSniper - No.

Can job-seekers rely on one quick search through a meta-job search tool to get good results and save time? For JobSniper - Yes.

Job seekers can confidently run one quick search through JobSniper and be assured it will return the same job matches from the job boards, as when they visit each job board and run the same search directly - and in the process definitely save time.

Meta-Job Search Tool Evaluation Report: JobSniper