As my job search progresses, I find myself more and more convinced that I know exactly what I want to do, and that there is (or at least should be) a huge market for it: making online job application systems that don't suck unimaginably. Frankly, just about everyone seems to need one.
So far, all the job sites fit into one of three categories:
- Email a resume to: jobs@whereever.com—This is fine, except that these places often have no searchable job list, so you don't know if they even have any openings that you might potentially fill.
- Fill in some contact info, paste in a resume, and press submit—Good except that they all really need a "preview" option, in case, say, a stray invisible character that causes their database to choke and forget everything after it somehow creeps it, and you don't notice until you use another site that does have a preview, and then you have to go back and resubmit your resume and worry that you'll look like an idiot who is applying for a software development job, but who can't even use an HTML form correctly.
- Use our handy-dandy resume builder—I will find the people who write these, and cane them. The IBM resume builder took me over an hour to complete, and I had a resume all ready! Granted, I was on dial up, but it was still insane. Every page took literally 2-3 minutes to load (probably because it was storing everything in hidden form fields, twice). All graduation and job start/end dates included the day, and there was no "present" option for jobs I'm still working at. You can't move between pages except in order, so when I found a typo during the final preview, I had to go all the way back to the beginning (the only function of the "edit" button), click my way through every painfully loading page until I reached the typo, fix the typo, then keep clicking until I reached the end.
So right now I'm in a fantastic position to know exactly what people want out of a job application system, and I'm qualified to make one. It's ideal.
Interested parties can contact me by: (1) emailing me, (2) using the comment submission form, or (3) building an entire blog from some kind of horrible templating system, then using trackback.
Category: Life
Subscribe