JobsMiner: A jobs detective for the social networking era

With unemployment so high these days, and jobs hard to come by, it’s easy to get discouraged; it just seems as if there are no jobs around. But the jobs are out there – with many of them posted on social networking sites. A new Israeli web application, called JobsMiner, was designed to ferret out those jobs. JobsMiner sweeps through social networks and lists open jobs that have been “advertised” on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and forums – and it’s an approach that makes a great deal of sense these days. The proof? In just one month, January 2012, JobsMiner dug up over 700,000 jobs posted on social networks in the US.

Just how does one go about getting a job in the Internet era? That’s the question job-seekers ask, of course, but employers are often just as confused. In recent years, both have tapped job sites — websites dedicated to advertising positions and letting users apply for them — to match skills and positions. But as both parties quickly discovered, job sites haven’t exactly worked out; job-seekers flock to them, inundating employers with endless resumes, while employers are buried under masses of information, making it almost impossible for them to ferret out decent candidates.

Clearly employers needed a new way of reaching out to potential employees, one they could make sense of — and the rise of social networks in the past several years has helped solve their problem. By reaching out to people who they “know” (electronically, at least) — by definition, a trusted network — they could spread the word about open jobs, recruiting on-line colleagues to help them find suitable candidates. Friends of friends — and friends of those further afield — could spread the word as well. Eventually, logic says, someone who’s capable of doing the job will turn up.

This approach works for job-seekers, as well. The social network — the personal one consisting of friends, business acquaintances, and even family members — has long been considered the best place to look for a job. Whatever form it took before the Internet era, today’s social network has migrated online, and it takes the form of your friends and colleagues on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. You may be friends — or know someone who knows someone who is a friend — of the person looking for someone with your skill set.

But why limit yourself to just your own social network? This is where JobsMiner comes in; instead of searching through your contacts or friends for opportunities, the whole Internet is now your personal social network! JobsMiner gives job seekers access to all job opportunities that appear on social networking platforms, in one place, without the need to be part of any social community. You just search the site by keyword, job title, or location, and all applicable jobs that have appeared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, blogs, user forums for websites related to your search, as well as other social networking sites, will appear on your list.

But is JobsMiner killing the goose that lays today’s golden eggs? After all, ease of access and the ability to apply at will was what killed job sites, as mentioned earlier. But JobsMiner really is different. You may get information about an available position, but you won’t get details until you befriend the person who posted it. Presumably, that person will check you out before they approve a relationship, taking you into their inner circle only if you meet their standards. JobsMiner simply gives a promising candidate the information about an opportunity. Whether their resume gets through or not is another matter. Thus, job-seekers are able to find out about jobs they might have missed out on — while employers can still exercise the control on the intake process they were seeking when they turned to social networking. According to a recent industry survey, one in six employees used social media to find their current job and about 54 percent of all job seekers use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to find jobs.

“We are extremely excited to be launching our one-of-a-kind job search tool,” said Ran Enoch, co-founder of JobsMiner. “With our extensive background and experience in providing real-time social media information analysis services and the fact that over 20 million people used online social networks to find their job in 2011, we recognized the need to unlock the wealth of hidden jobs across all online social media. JobsMiner aggregates the unstructured job postings and organizes them into a structured list search engine style interface which makes the job search faster and more effective. The system’s algorithm continuously teaches itself and improves in order to ensure the validity and accuracy of the job openings it presents.”