Sunday, April 06, 2008

Forward-Looking Job recommendation

So as a student in school, my resume had been made publicly available not only in school resume bank but also in a few other websites suchas Monster, CareerBuilder etc. Then as many other classmates did, I got email like the following regularly:

Hi Hong,

I noticed your background and thought you may be interested in finding out more about our new job opening, which is pasted below for your review. 

The position is for a Web Developer in Cambridge, MA. 

For more details or to apply simply visit our website:
.....


Cool but no thank you. Clearly this email from some website/software doing keyword matching then send email to people who may did a few things before that meet a few opening position. The above job is about a Java programmer which was what I did about 10 years ago as my first job in 1998 but I never did a line of java coding after 1999. So how helpful this type of software is? almost nothing. It's largely built on the theory that if someone did something beforfe then he or she would be more likely to do something again. But clearly those technique cannot read people's mind. They cannot and wont be able to understand how I am going to develop my career path. They don't understand aftering doing A, I am towards B. It's called contextual, is it?

If a job site can clearly read people's mind by analyzing their resume (past employeement history), industry change ( enterprise software is declining, web 2.0 is booming for example or recent subprime loan crisis), personal fact (getting married/get MBA/), then it will definitely be a huge success.

Any job website is on this track? Could be a Monster/CareerBuilder killer for sure.

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