This is a guest blog post by job hunter Sally Lawton.
Company: Jobfox.com
Slogan: Be the Hunted
Pros: Creates a professional Webpage; generates a skills list; automatically matches candidates to jobs; protects job-seeker’s information
Cons: Limited sample size; limited job and skill categories
Do you ever wish that the “I’m here for networking” option on MySpace could actually help your career? Jobfox.com takes the personal-page layout of MySpace, and gives it a professional edge, leaving job-hunters confident that employers will see them at their professional best, and not at their partying best.
The professional Webpage generated by Jobfox can be a powerful marketing tool because it offers a centralized location for a candidate’s resume and portfolio. The page also offers a skills map, a list of what the candidate wants in a job, and an “about me” section. The skills map shows how a particular position generated a candidate’s skill-set. While it helps a user to list skills beyond what they have on their resume, the map is potentially hard for employers to read. Another shortcoming is that the skills must match with a position title generated by Jobfox. Users with unique experiences might have difficulty creating an accurate skills map.
Like many Career 2.0 websites, Jobfox offers a personality quiz. The Saville Focus Styles test asks detailed questions about leadership style, team and peer interactions, approaches to managing change, and work culture. While introspection is always good, the quiz doesn’t seem to fit in with the theme of creating a job-search marketing tool.
A feature that will further remind users of Facebook and MySpace are the tracking tools. Users can track who has been viewing their resume and Webpage on the site. If a user needs constant updates, Jobfox can send alerts to their cell-phone. For those of us who like to stay informed, this can be an attractive feature, though it isn’t clear to me how this feature could help me land an interview. Or just make me a Job Search Addict.
For those of us secretly looking for a job while at work, Jobfox has a nifty “Boss over Shoulder” button, that when pressed displays Google. Clicking “Go Back to Where You Came From” returns you to Jobfox. I wish every job search page had a similar feature.
Although Jobfox promises to make the candidate the hunted, it does not dramatically depart from a traditional job search engine. The webpage feature is certainly helpful, and it is nice to have jobs waiting for you upon login, but those do not necessarily translate to employers searching Jobfox any more than they would search Monster.com. Furthermore, the jobs featured on the site are located mainly in D.C., Boston, San Francisco, and Atlanta, although the FAQ page promises growth.
At the very least, users can get a free webpage and URL, which they can use when presenting a slick online application. As for me, I might tinker with my personal page a bit more, but I don’t see returning to Jobfox too often.
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