Hacking Online Job Profiles

For job hunters these days, the face of job hunting has changed. You can search a plethora of online portals where companies and recruitment agencies advertise job vacancies. This sounds fairly simple.

Yet, the technology that’s intended to enhance job hunting has become a constraint in itself. Finding a job can sometimes be quite a daunting task.

In South Africa, for instance, the current unemployment rate is 27.2%, and 55% of that is comprised of youth 15 to 35 years old. While there are many contributing factors, access to job opportunities is often inhibited by onerous processes that could be streamlined.

Re-inventing the wheel

Current job platforms require users to re-invent the wheel. When applying for a job, you need to create an online job profile with your personal and career details and submit your application. The trouble with this though is that each time one applies for a job on a different job portal, you have to create a new job profile all over again. After doing this a number of times it becomes a tedious and frustrating exercise.

Many job applications are simply abandoned where applicants have to create a new profile from scratch each time. Surely, there must be a much better solution.

While there is a glut of job portals out there, they operate in fragmented silos; in fierce competition against, instead of cooperating with, each other. But what if there’s a way to hack job profiles, legally I mean, to make the job application less onerous.

Indeed there are job platforms that have plugins that can pull and replicate data from a resume or other portals, but these initiatives have several shortcomings.

• These efforts are disjointed and limited to a small scale and need be expanded into standard practice. It lacks co-ordination.
• Mismatch in data sets: the data sets that are replicated do not match with the original profile data and are not properly synced. This results in the new profile being incomplete or lacking data. In other, there needs to an agreed on standard data set and format for the online platform.

Universal jobs portal

Creating a profile on job portals should be an intuitive, automated process. What’s missing is a universal jobs portal that recruiters and job applicants can connect to and access with basic functionalities:

Recruiters: recruiting agencies and employers should connect to the universal jobs portal quite easily via secure APIs and plugins, pull or access relevant applicant data.

Applicants: job applicants should be able to create or update a job profile once and upload supporting documents. They don’t have to repeat the process. When they apply for a job on other job portals, the profile data can be ported or replicated without having to create a new profile for each application.

We need a go-to universal portal solution that is an industry benchmark and which can serve as master database or repository for all job application data. The portal has the potential to become the single biggest source of job applicants in the country, and can be expanded later. Another sub-project will be verification and vetting of applicant data.

Is there anyone up to the task, I think tackling a project like this is a massive opportunity.