Job Descriptions Suck!

I saw a commercial about Indeed.com. They claim to have over 60,000 new jobs added every day.

This sounds great.

Except for one thing.

Job descriptions suck!

Of these 60,000 new jobs, how many of them are actually unique? If you can not differentiate one job description from another, how can an individual differentiate themselves from all of the other candidates that may be applying for a job?

Most job portals like Indeed do quite well at allowing you to search for a job title. If you are adept at doing keyword searches you can usually refine what you are looking for to something close to something for which you are qualified.

But what about the other side of the aisle?

Recruiters are searching your profiles. They do similar keyword searches against your indexed resume.

Depending on how they do a search, and the search technology they may be using actually determines whether you are found or not.

It has been said if you have more than a one page resume you are overlooked by most recruiters.

How do you stand out when there are so many technical reasons why you will not get noticed?

I think there is a different way to look at things.

Very seldom in my career have I done one job during my tenure at an employer. I think others have seen similar things.

I broke out some R code, started capturing some job descriptions sent to me, and did some text similarity mining.

What I came up with, I published on pubProjX.com It takes a collection of what I call "project write-ups" compares the project writeup with various job descriptions in my little database, and shows the top 10 job descriptions that match that writeup. If you do enough write-ups, you can see a graph created that shows your career path. For good measure, I also provide a word-cloud of you a persons write-ups, and do a centrality representation from the graph to show the job descriptions an individual has matched most frequently.

My pubprojx.com profile is : Doug Needham

Would having this make you stand out from the crowd?

I don't know yet.
But one thing I have found, when I show people my profile page it makes a very compelling story to have a conversation about my career path, and the job descriptions that match what I can do.

Wasn't there something in the news recently about "joining a conversation"?

Create a profile and get a recruiter to join your conversation.

 There are instructions on the site that show you how to send a profile write-up.

Send me a write-up and join the site.

What will your story be?