Job search is very broken. Monster/Dice/Craigslist &c are broken. Not sexy, I know, but I imagine the people who solve that problem will become quite rich.
i had an idea of semi-fixing that, or rather rerouting around the problem by shifting the job-finding and -posting from the HR dept. to the individual employees.
Let's say you're a web programmer living in City A, and commuting to City B, a commute of 2 hours. Unbeknown to you, there's a web programmer in City B, commuting to City A every day. My idea would be to put these two in touch with each other, and eventually facilitate a job switch. You basically swap jobs (assuming you're both of equal proficiency, and the higher-ups agree to it), and don't have to commute any more. Yay/Nay?
You know i really think the idea is really unique. It might be difficult/impractical in reality?
A job is not just a location, but a combination of lot of things like salary compensation, work culture. So it will be difficult for two people to agree on something like this. One would always think, that he's losing out on the deal. It might still work!, but maybe it's just a little too radical.
I was toying with a similar approach, but i think the social angle on job search is still missing. Eg. recommending jobs for your friends, voting on which companies are good to work for etc. There are a lot of small companies that don't get a lot of good talent, just cos they're not Google/Facebook.
I would love to get a chance to discuss, brainstorm with you on this, since i've been seriously thinking of jumping into job search with the hope of doing it right.
The best opportunities aren't the ones being screened by HR. Most job postings look like someone got a description of the job from the manager, looked for the sentence fragments that could be classified as skills or experience, then put those in as the list of requirements.
LinkedIn is probably a closer approximation to what's needed, but as far as I can tell it's hard to get far out of your acquaintances with a basic account.
