Once I found an accountant through Twitter. Not long ago, we hot CVs by fax, and to invite a candidate for an interview, we had to get him on the landline phone at home.
Why I remembered this? Now there are a lot of resources for information exchange. These are specialized job platforms like rabota.ua, work.ua, hh.ua, LinkedIn, not to mention the leaders like Monster, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, Indeed. Facebook and Google are also actively present on the market.
Ukraine is sure to have its own mentality in terms of labor market. We are still not using all the potential of, say, Facebook, or we are not connected to the Google for jobs tools.
But is spite of the variety of opportunities, there are platforms, which can waste the effort of both employers and candidates.
I think, the most paradoxical resource is work.ua. It is well-advertised and known, is long present on the market… But it is extremely hard for the parties to meet there!
A candidate, who believed the advertisement and placed his CV receives not as many calls as he could, since he cannot be found. On the other hand, an employer, who paid for the service, placed a vacancy, and is searching online, also does not “see” the potential employees.
Search interface is a nightmare. Key words search is working so badly, that one can find more on the site with the help of Google, than with its own search engine. There is no possibility to scale the search. If I need, for example, a PR specialist, I have to eye-search through the entire Marketing section. On the other hand, a targeted search of the vacancies is also a big problem for a candidate.
HeadHunter has for a long time been almost a perfect model, the source of good vacancies and strong professionals. It is rather expensive, is good moderated, but now is far behind the market.
Rabota.ua has some time ago shown a significant growth from a simple site for moderate vacancies, but it has too early stopped its real development…
Why do I talk of this? Information itself has ceased to be an asset. The really needed skill is the ability to use it. The platforms mentioned above can help their clients solve their tasks only in case they ensure contemporary search algorithms, a decent interface for working with the information for both candidate and employer.
Until that time the main advice to the candidates is to use all available resources for searching for the positions and telling the world you are open for new job opportunities.
It is effective to use passive search, like status in Facebook, carefully and SEO effectively filled out profile in LinkedIn, or placing CVs on all available job platforms like HeadHunter, rabota.ua, work.ua simultaneously with proactive approach, like responding to open vacancies, making relevant subscriptions, direct approaching of potential employers/ decision makers and recruitment agencies, being actively present in, say, Facebook groups.
The situation for employers is worse. Even if you announced the world about your need, you will have to spend a lot of time to mine single crumbs of really valuable candidates in the flood of propositions. Because the incoming information has to be effectively processed! This skill in the time when the information ceased to be value in itself, becomes the most important and valuable. But this is a topic for a separate post.