A Quick Start Guide to Consumer Grade Job Search Technology

Introduction

Finding and utilising the best job search technology around is a difficult process. It takes time and effort to find the right vendor and fit for your business. But with the help of the right technology, it has become easier than ever before to make the experience of matching candidates and jobs simple. 

There are many job search engines available on the internet that can help your candidates find their dream job. These engines should in theory make a job seekers life easier by providing them with all the information that they need in one place. The truth however, is much different. Inconsistencies in job search, poor user experience & technological limitations often create a frustrating experience that sees potential candidates leaving websites. 

The following article will provide a quick start guide to consumer grade job search technology and how it can be used to win over more candidates.

What do we mean by consumer grade job search technology?

Consumer grade job search technology is a type of software that is designed to help people find jobs. It can be used by anyone who is looking for work and to power the website of any agency looking to provide an exceptional experience to its users online. 

Consumer grade job search technology is one facet of the wider consumer grade recruitment experience, specifically aimed at the candidate experience. 

A consumer grade job search experience should provide a seamless, almost thoughtless experience for candidates. It should be so easy to use that they don’t need any sort of visual cues or training to use whilst at the same time have the right technical setup to catch any mistakes they make such as typos. 

Why does my job search need to be consumer grade?

Building technology that powers job searching is the most complex part of any recruitment website. Large companies may have their own internal hiring and recruiting teams, whereas smaller companies might use off-the-shelf talent solutions, but both want quality results for candidates and job postings.

Trying to match these together may sound simple on the surface, but traditional keyword searching is too simplistic and gets choked up in some situations, such as;

• hidden or extraneous keywords, also known as keyword stuffing 
• job postings that require five years of experience in a technology that's really only been around for two years
• and things like typos, acronyms, and overuse of technical jargon

Ultimately, these lead to poor experiences and bad candidate fits.

What are SourceFlow doing to improve the job search experience?

The Cloud Talent Solution job search API is designed to power the job search experience with built-in machine learning algorithms. In short, we send your job listing information over, such as your company information and job details, to the job search API. The API analyses the job data to develop an understanding of the jobs. Once jobs have been indexed by the API, candidates can search against the jobs and get search results by relevance or other sorting preferences.

There are four common use cases that typically leverage a solution like this;

• job boards where the site returns a list of jobs to job seekers
• career site providers that provide career site services to client companies,
• Recruitment & Staffing agencies which provide short or long-term employees to clients
• and applicant tracking systems which are used by companies to track applicants through the hiring process.

The job search API is designed to be modified to best fit with your needs, and the API's performance can vary significantly based on how it's configured.

Also, it's worth noting that the job search API is not to be confused with the jobs indexing API that facilitates jobs showing up on google.co.uk search.

There's a separate indexing API to have job listings show up on searches that people make on google.co.uk that SourceFlow also integrate with.

The Difference Between Job Boards and Recruitment websites

Job boards are a place where people can post their job openings and potential employees can find and apply for them. They offer a highly monetised service offering which has to appeal to a wide range of different customers. Job boards invest heavily into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, usually far in excess of recruitment agencies and their own websites. Recruitment websites, on the other hand, are a place where agencies can post their vacancies in order to attract potential candidates, clients and consultants into their own business. .

The difference between job boards and recruitment websites is that the former is more focused on the employer’s perspective while the latter is more focused on the employee’s perspective.

Conclusion

There are huge revenue benefits to improving the job search technology on your recruitment agencies website;

• Find the right candidates faster with specialist acquisition technology 
• Enrich the experience for candidates
• Streamline and gradually improve your talent acquisition process with machine learning
• Increase quality hires by using ML to understand the intent of your users in real time. This means your candidates get matched to ideal jobs faster and therefore placed with your clients faster
• By using ML your job search can automatically make sense of confusing job descriptions and search queries.
• Keep your websites tech up to date by using cloud technology