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While widely available job boards and advanced recruitment technology have undoubtedly made it easy for those seeking new employment, the system has its own set of problems.
Advanced recruitment technology may have more or less done away with annoyances such as paper resumes on linen-like stationery, but it has come with its own drawbacks, the crux of which is anonymity.
Anyone who has ever sent a resume to a general-use e-mail address or inserted their c.v. into the text fields of an online application system and pressed “send” knows the sinking feeling that ensues. The overwhelming odds are their resumes are going into a cyberspace black hole and are likely to receive nothing in return beyond an automatically generated “thank you for your interest” response. So much for the Web making things easier.
A new job site aspires to tackle this communication gap by putting the job seeker back in control of their hunt. Launched Sept. 12 by Rob McGovern, the founder and former chairman and CEO of CareerBuilder.com, Jobfox.com lets job hunters create their own personally branded career space and alerts them via mobile phone, text messages or IM whenever a potential employer views their resume.
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Creating a personally branded job page is free and users are given unique urls (for example, http://www.jobfox.com/people/sarahsmith) at which they can list their dream job characteristics using tags, upload work samples and even communicate that they are happy in their current job, making them the holy grail of recruiters, who consider those in this “passive majority”—with their lack of urgency for a new job—the ideal candidates.
Built-in widgets enable candidates to easily share their Jobfox pages on other social networking sites, including MySpace, and allows candidates to instant message employers.
Jobfoxs resume tracking features, which are also free, can send candidates an electronic message when an employer is checking them out. The Resume Tracker also works with other job sites, including Monster, CareerBuilder, Craigslist and corporate employment sites.
McGovern, now Jobfoxs CEO, hatched the idea of this new job board after extensively testing these ideas on job seekers.
“More than 500,000 professionals in Jobfox test markets throughout the United States have been a tremendous help and inspiration for creating the first candidate-centric career site,” McGovern said.
Addressing what he saw as shortcomings of traditional job boards—too many unrelated job listings showing up in searches, lack of communication throughout the process—McGovern sees Jobfox as better fitting job seekers needs.
“The top professionals have already given up on the old job-board game,” he said. “High achievers dont have the time or the need to keyword search through hundreds of job postings. Jobfox puts the spotlight on career-minded candidates instead of job listings, turning the traditional job-board model upside down.”
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