[Note to my current colleagues .. don't freak out because I was on a job site.]
This week I received an email from Marketing Magazine [paid reg required to access most of site] telling me about a new newsletter product they have: Careers in Marketing. Finally, a career newsletter for Canadian Marketers' I love Marketing Sherpa's Career Climber but they rarely have Canadian positions.
Marketing magazine's Custom Publishing division is pleased to introduce its first electronic magazine, Careers in Marketing. Careers in Marketing has been developed as a resource for aiding marketing professionals in their career sourcing and development. The e-zine examines the who, the what, the where and the how of today's marketing job market. We hope you find the new format convenient and easy to read, and we welcome your feedback.
I didn't actually know Marketing Mag had a Custom Publishing division (it's not listed on their site). In any case, looks like they have some interesting articles in this issue. Sample titles: Breaking with Tradition and How Can Branding be the Answer to Finding People. I would provide a link to the main page of this issue, but there isn't one.
I clicked thru and read one of the articles. Good summary of the issue (that a company's brand is important in atttracting talent), but no attribution. Another article includes the line "For us at Capital C to need an eclectic combination of individuals ..." but the article itself is not signed/attributed. Is this Tony Chapman's Capital C?
They also provide a selection of job openings from Working.com (who seems to co-sponsor the newsletter): marketing and creative jobs that seem relevant to the target audience. I've never really checked out Working.com, so I thought I would click through. First is a Director of Marketing in Vancouver. Goes right to the job posting. Great. Interesting job, but not for me.
Next link: Head, Creative Partners in Toronto. Cool, I'm in Toronto. Click through. One of the first things at the top: "Position Posting End Date: Nov 16, 2005". But its Dec 2. Why am I seeing this? So is the job active or not?
I click on the "home" button to poke around some more. I am taken to the "Toronto" home. How do I get to the real home? I have to edit the URL. Aargh. The "real" home is a big map of Canada. Didn't we stop using maps for primary navigation in the late 90's?
OK, I have friends and family in Victoria .. let's check out what's happening there. I click on Victoria and get a very busy page. But there are some career streams at the top. "Executive" sounds good. (Dream big!) I click.
There is a small listing of further executive streams at the top (CEO, CIO, VP Technology, etc.) but the bulk of the page is taken up with "executive news". Or, more accurately, news about executives. Inspiring stories like Conrad Black's legal woes and CIBC revamping its outrageous CEO compensation package. WHY am I being distracted from my primary functional task at this site? Aside from the headlines, this is a very b'zizy site. Tiny ads, big ads, lots of mice type. Seriously. I'm supposed to be here to find a job. I'm starting to feel a little tense.
OK. Focus. Ooo .. VP Marketing. I can do that. Click.
And here's why working.com truly sucks.
Victoria (supposedly) has 1 job that is for a VP of Marketing. Not bad, Victoria isn't known to be the epicentre of Marketing VP's. However, the job isn't for a VP of Marketing. Yes, it has the words "VP" and "Marketing" in the ad. But the job is for a temporary Sales Accountant. If I am a VP Marketing candidate, I have so clicked over to Workopolis. This lack of contextual search on a site that is already contextual is truly poor customer and brand experience. It's insulting to job seekers and to advertisers. Now some of you might say, "Oh, search is in its infancy" or "are you sure you formatted the search correctly?" To the first, I answer "bullshit". To the second I answer, "but working.com formatted this search for me. Shouldn't they know better?" Workopolis is a perfect example of how to do it right. And it all comes down to context.
The pre-canned search for a VP Marketing on working.com:
http://workingvictoriajobs.canada.com/js.php?q=VP%20Marketing&qField=All
&lookid=victoria&qCity=Victoria&qState=BC&qCountry=Canada&qMiles=50
The pre-canned search for a VP Marketing on Workopolis:
http://search.workopolis.com/jobshome/db/work4.process_job?pi_vertical=MARKETING
&pi_search=Vice-President,+Marketing&pi_msg=&pi_keyword=(vp+or+v-p+or+vice-$president)
+and+(marketing+or+mkt+or+mrkt+or+mrkting)+not+assistant
&pi_smart=N&pi_employer=ALL-------&pi_category=ALL------------&pi_industry=ALL---------------
&pi_location=ALL-----------&pi_language=EN&iaction=Go&pi_post_date=&pi_title_only=Y&pi_sort_col=+
Now search phrases are not pretty to look at and casual users should never have to worry about it, but hang in there. There are three things I want to point out:
1. working.com - the focus is on the location. In today's mobile marketplace and tendency towards a 7-9 career work-life, physical place is likely not the best place to start. Yes, let me filter by place, but don't make it the primary term, particularly at the sacrifice of useful information.
2. workopolis knows that not all job ads are equal. It builds into the query variants on search terms both for VP and for Marketing.
3. workopolis understands context. See that small "+not+assistant" in the third line? That is everything. It knows that if I am looking for a VP Marketing job, that I do not want to see jobs for Marketing Assistants, jobs for assistants to VP's or especially temporary sales accountant jobs.
Now, to be fair, I could recreate this search on working.com. But I have to check a couple of special boxes on their "advanced search" page. Essentially, I have to provide my own context. Which is unreasonable in that they implied that they were giving me context:
This looks like context to me. If they had just said "search for jobs" at the outset, I *might* be more forgiving. Some of you are probably asking, "Dude, why does this piss you off so much?" And it frustrates me because it just doesn't have to be this shitty. This is not a technical issue. If the designer or the strategist or the marketer who put this thing together just thought about their customer a bit more, it would be a way better experience. As an advertiser, I would be excited that you were supporting my brand; as a job seeker, I would be delighted by my experience and recommend the site. Reg Braithwaite had a similar rant at TorCamp: it (applications) doesn't have to suck.
He's right. It doesn't. If we would just all pay a bit more attention to our customers and their context.
Technorati Tags: context, marketing, experiencedesign