Campus2Careers

A few years ago a young man, Nathan Green had an idea for a career-related website.  It was a challenge to try and find a niche that was not taken but had some upside.  He struck on 2 things:  What if the site "evaluated" someone's profile and attempted to match the individual with jobs or organizations?  Secondly, what if the target was medium to small businesses who sometimes have trouble making recruitment connections to hire the best matches.

What Nathan came up with is Campus2Careers and they have been quite successful. Over the past month or so, I have had the opportunity to use the system more often and have found it to be very user friendly, navigable and pretty accurate in it's matches. If I were a new college graduate or young professional I think that it would match me with a lot more jobs than it has, because they specialize in entry-level positions.  We keep advising young applicants to develop online portfolios and this system has a lot of flexibility to show off accomplishments in a portfolio-like way.  If I were a small or medium sized business looking to hire professionals I would have to pay attention to the system they have created because it seems to work well and quickly narrows down choices based on the information provided by applicants.

They must be doing something right because Campus2Careers was recently acquired by Sure Score and Nathan is a new VP!

Yes Indeed

One thing that has happened over the past few weeks is an opportunity to learn more about what's going on with job boards and job posting systems.  I thought it might be interesting to offer some insights into some of these, a few of which are very interesting in their unique approaches to gathering job seeker data and "finding" possible matches.  This is a step forward, albeit an experimental one, for these services because it goes beyond a much more laborious traditional job search/application process.

Let me be clear, I do not believe that any of these services is the answer to ultimately getting hired.  They are good to very good research tools, but ultimately networking and interviews are the key tools to getting a job offer.

That said, I will give my thoughts on one of the more popular job search sights, Indeed.  Indeed is a job aggregator.  It searches many sites and tries to provide a "one stop" to find all of the jobs that fit the search criteria.  It has a very good advanced search feature that allows you to create saved job searches and automatic emails to matches, etc.  You can sort the results by relevance, although the results that show up sometimes leave me questioning what the system was actually looking for.  You can also sort by date, which is helpful if you're running a saved search and just want to view recent postings.

Indeed generally takes you to the recruiting organization website to do the actual job application.  This is good because the data on responses to applications through third-party websites is not good.  Applications done directly on the recruiting organization website have a somewhat better response rate.

Overall, I like Indeed but it is less targeted and massive in the data that it can provide.  The less targeted something is, the more of a "roulette wheel" effect and the less likely you will get a positive response.