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Meta-Job Search Tool
Evaluation - Wanted Jobs. Our Findings: JobSniper Is FAR Superior
To Wanted Jobs.
Beth
Kniss, Insala Vice President of Research & Development; Leah
Niska, Insala Researcher
This is the second part of a
research study series being conducted by Insala's Research Team.
Our goal is to study the most popular meta-job search tools to determine
if they offer the job seeker value in sourcing jobs on the Internet.
Our
first evaluation shared in the January issue of InfoLink
was on JobSniper.
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). 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
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 Wanted Jobs Compared to JobSniper
A sample search for an "accountant" job in Boston was
run through Wanted Jobs and JobSniper. The exact same search was
then re-run through each of the job boards that these respective
tools searched. An overview of our findings is below. The detailed
findings for Wanted Jobs and JobSniper show the statistical results
of these searches.
| Question |
Findings: JobSniper |
Findings: Wanted Jobs |
| VOLUME/THOROUGHNESS
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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?
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Answer: Yes, it finds many
of the available matching jobs.
JobSniper found all or even more of the matching jobs available
at 35 of the 45 job boards it searched. Of the remaining 10
job boards, JobSniper typically missed 2-3 available matching
jobs.
Overall, 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.
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Answer: No, it does not
find many of the available jobs. It misses most of them.
Wanted Jobs only found 5% of the available
jobs.
Wanted Jobs was highly inadequate
at finding all of the available jobs at the job boards it searched.
It only found 3 matching jobs when it searched through
the 16 sites where it found jobs. Our same search through each
of the 16 job board directly found 55 matching jobs.
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| ACCURACY |
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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?
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Answer: Fairly good validity
- 39% accuracy rating.
39% of the jobs found through JobSniper
were accurate matches.
This was basically the same accuracy rating
as when searching the job boards themselves which yielded
38% of the jobs to be accurate matches.
Bottom line, running the same searches through the majority
of the job boards directly did not produce any better job
matches.
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Answer: Poor validity -
6% accuracy rating.
6% of the jobs found through Wanted Jobs
were accurate matches.
When searching the job boards themselves,
47% of the jobs found were accurate matches.
Bottom line, running the same searches through
the job boards directly found significantly better job matches.
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| EFFICIENCY |
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Do job seekers actually get more and better
matches by visiting the job boards directly (which takes more
time)?
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Answer: No.
JobSniper actually found more matching jobs
(946) at the sites, than when we searched the job boards directly
(744).
|
Answer: Yes.
Wanted Jobs only found 3 matching jobs at
the job boards; when we searched the job boards directly,
we found 55 matching jobs.
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| OVERALL |
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Can job seekers rely on one quick search through
a meta-job search tool to get good results and save time?
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Answer: Yes.
Job seekers can confidently run one quick search through JobSniper
and be assured it will return basically 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.
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Answer: No.
Job seekers should not rely upon one quick
search through Wanted Jobs to find all of the available matching
jobs at the job boards it searches. In our test search, it missed
the majority of available matching jobs.
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Based on these findings, jobseekers would be well advised to use
JobSniper instead of Wanted Jobs for a meta-job search tool.
Meta-Job
Search Tool Evaluation Report: Wanted Jobs
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