I’m lazy. You are, too. If we had our way, everything would come to us via silver platter at the snap of our fingers: groceries. Clothing. Jobs. So when a new online jobhunting service promised to do all the work while I sat here, bony ass on my grubby non-Aeron office chair, I decided I would do a favor to all you other lazy workers and give it a whirl.
Let me back up and say this new business has creds. It’s founded by Rob McGovern, founder of CareerBuilder, the No. 1 jobs site on the web. He made a sick amount of money upon its sale and patiently waited out the noncompete term until he was free to reinvent himself as–the founder of another jobs site on the web.
This one is different, McGovern insists. “At CareerBuilder, 5% of job listings result in a hire,” he says during our phone interview yesterday. “That means a 95% failure rate.” Clearly, the idea needed tweaking. His new model, called Jobfox, is “like an eHarmony for jobs,” he says. By requiring both job seeker and employer to input specific information about the kind of job and candidate each sought, the system would ensure a far better match.
A cool feature of the site is the trackable resumé; you get notified via text message if and when some employer is checking you out. It’s sort of like knowing you’re being gossiped about.
I was hitched by the time the online dating sites took off, but I always thought eHarmony sounded like work. And, being lazy, I wanted to know where’s the part where I get to sit on my bony ass and await job offers. I was initially encouraged by a tool I likened to a resumé dump, in which the job seeker uploads her C.V. onto Jobfox and Jobfox dumps the info into its database. Only it didn’t work so well. All my data info was wrong, so I had to go in and manually enter my various positions, along with the duties. I stopped at two jobs ago, so lazy am I.
I liked the “Boss Over Shoulder” feature, which is like a digital eject button: hit it, and a Google screen pops up. But the input pages on Jobfox are so plain that bosses are likely to think you’re just filling out some boring HR form online.
Take the meat of the site, where job seekers select job preferences. It’s as lazy-friendly as possible, requiring users only to check boxes. My beef is that the preferences were along the lines of things like health coverage (duh, check), 401(k) matching contributions (are you kidding? check), an ESOP plan (I forget what that is but yes, check). Nothing about if I want P&L responsibility, management training, an active community of diverse affinity groups.
In other words, though McGovern denies it, Jobfox is better geared–for now–toward entry-level workers. Also, it’s currently beta-testing in only four markets (Washington, Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta), a fact I did not know until after my tryout. I was thus stunned to find that, within a 10-mile radius of New York City, absolutely no employer wanted me. No one. Zip.
Once Jobfox launches in my market, though, I’m counting on the dental-plan-offering, 401(k)-matched, gym-membership-subsidizing offers to pour in. Meantime, I’m sitting on my butt and contemplating my snack drawer.