I’ve heard a lot of buzz recently about JobFox (they closed a $20 million plus round) and decided to take a test drive (sorry for not doing this earlier, as I’ve been really swamped). I was asked to take a personality test when I tried to upload my file and JobFox exclaimed, “We’ve built a revolutionary new job fit engine that’s smart as a fox: it knows how to match people and jobs on The 10 Dimensions of a Good Job Fit”. Sound familiar? You bet! This is exactly equivalent to eHarmony’s 29 dimensions compatibility test. While JobFox does give each job seeker a homepage, it’s just a resume in a different layout. It seems quite a stretch to call this “revolutionary” when it is in fact a little twist on the old game. Looking for the answer, I checked the executive team page. No wonder! The founder of JobFox also founded Careerbuilder!
I’ve probably been watching too much of the presidential debates lately, but this comes to mind when I think about JobFox, ”Real change is never going to happen if all we do is send the same people back to Washington to sit in different chairs.” We all know that we need to bring some real change to the online job search space, but simply changing the format of the resume or using multi-dimension tests won’t do it. We need to change the employer-centric thinking to user-centric thinking. At uCareer, we understand that the 21st century is all about the competition for talent, only those who provide the best tools for the users will succeed. The 21st century deserves a new kind of approach, and a new generation of candidates deserves a new kind of service. The fundamental problem that I have with these job matchmakers is that they assume the candidates don’t have the time or are incapable of making their own career decisions, so the matchmakers do it for them. That’s not what we believe. We believe the problem is that the administrative issues in the job search and career management process are tedious. This is the area where candidates need help. At uCareer, we encourage job seekers to spend more time thinking about and planning their career and to take control of their career rather than handing it over to matchmakers asking them to decide their future. Furthermore, I am not a fan of this faceless, secretive way of job matching. I just don’t believe employers will be able to make a decision by reading a faceless resume. As I mentioned before, uCareer’s members will be able to present themselves in a brand new way so that our candidates won’t have to go through meaningless screening interviews, and when they do go to an interview they will know that they are qualified and more likely to get the position.
I spend a lot of time talking with job seekers, especially young people in their 20s or 30s. What they want and deserve is a new kind of online job tool that helps them streamline the tedious administrative stuff so that they can focus on what is more important: thinking about and planning their future. At uCareer, we firmly believe that you CAN have a career by being yourself.
