There are a raft of new find-a-job and career sites that have come to our attention in the last few weeks. There are the “me toos”: retooled versions of existing sites that may have a nice touch here or there, but overall do little except to add to the online recruitment clutter.
Then there are sites like UpMo.com that actually try to help a job seeker understand that a job is not a career. The subscription-based service launched earlier this year, but just this week added a job search engine that promises to filter the duff for its members. ResumeFit.com, meanwhile, serves the recruiter by incorporating a candidate assessment right into the resume. As a company partner told us, “this is great for triaging candidates on the front end.”
UpMo
Because this is a subscription-based service, there is just so far you can get before you must enter a credit card. From what we could see and from what its founder and CEO, Promise Phelon, says, UpMo is a career guidance resource that seems especially well-tuned to the young professional who will work for upward mobility (ergo, the UpMo name).
UpMo takes the pulse of your current employment readiness by assessing such things as the quality and breadth of your network. How often are you in touch with the people who can help you? It also compares you against a representative role model, charting your career against the hypothetical (or actual) individual whose career path you want to emulate. Like a good financial planning program, you can do “what-ifs” with your career to see how it changes the trajectory. Write a book; become a conference speaker; get an advanced degree are among the multiple choices. Of course, if you can’t write or speak, then those wouldn’t be good choices for you. UpMo is realistic about life, but it’s not going to tell you what you can or can’t do; only how actually doing it will make a difference.
Once you’ve got something you like — and can actually do — then UpMo creates a career plan so detailed it will break out the tasks into calendared increments and remind you to make that networking phone call or send a courtesy email. Ignoring it, of course, is optional. But the program is built on networking principles espoused by every career professional, so if you can keep to the schedule (which, by the way, you set) then that career timeline UpMo created for you can be achieved.
ResumeFit
You need an accountant who can handle all the financial details of your business, from cash accounting to preparing the tax returns for your growing, but still small business. So you post the job and get 200 resumes in the first 24 hours. As you work your way through the resumes, you quickly realize that it’s easy to weed out the obvious nos, but the resumes in the pile of possibles are all beginning to sound alike. Here is where ResumeFit fits in.
As Managing Partner Scott Runkle explains, “Our goals are simple near term: help a job seeker better differentiate themselves from their peers, and help the employers better understand how the job seeker may fit the role they are applying for.”
ResumeFit helps differentiate candidates by providing an assessment of their “soft skills,” those personality traits and work habits that help define “fit” and which can mean the difference between success and failure on the job. The assessment used by ResumeFit is called the WorkPlace Big Five Profile, which is based on the Five Factor Model of Personality. Job seekers take the assessment, then pay to make it available to employers.
It’s not a replacement for job-specific testing or those designed to measure how well a candidate fits within a very specific corporate culture, but for the majority of jobs and companies, a ResumeFit profile is a way to differentiate among candidates.
“For many small to midsize companies who may not even use assessments, the employer gains valuable insight into a candidate they may not otherwise gain from just the resume alone,” Runkle says.
ResumeFit offers a corporate screening service, in addition to the job seeker assessment. Role Fit Screener compares and ranks candidates against the profile of a company’s best workers.
BigDogHub
This is a site with a name to which we’re partial, even if it is misleading in that it has nothing at all to do with big dogs, literal or figurative. Instead, this is one of the new crop of profile sites, where resumes are enhanced with videos, pictures, personal data, and so forth. Ditto for employer sites, where the sample company profile is of founder John Hughes’ search and recruitment company.
The biggest differentiator here is that employers can post questions to the profiles. As the questions and answers grow, recruiters get a clearer picture of a candidate and their abilities and skills. Candidates get to do the same to employers.
Because of the nature of the site, job postings and profiles are only available to registered members.
Jobaphile$
Another “me too” job auction site, this one appealing to students, is built around the eBay model. Employers post a job; job seekers bid. Employers choose the bid they prefer based on price and the bidders qualifications.
What makes this different from the pack of other freelance and project sites in the world? Nothing that we can see. Yet we’re hesitant to dismiss it entirely, since Jobaphiles was nurtured by startup incubator Dreamit Ventures. It’s also gotten a bit of gee whiz publicity from Fox and an NBC affiliate.
The auction job genre keeps trying to gain a foothold outside the freelance world, but the concept has never taken hold. Instead, those college student jobs like tutor, nanny, research assistant, and so on gravitate to the “Gigs” section of Craigslist.