Jobs4Jersey.com™ A Review (of sorts)

With as much fanfare as an underfunded, under-appreciated Government Agency could muster, the New Jersey Department of Labor launched a new website last week called jobs4jersey.com™ (cause it’s hip to use the “4” instead of “for” I suppose.) In true fashion these days, the officials interviewed for the news reports all felt the pain of the poor, beleaguered NJ business that just can’t seem to find anyone to fill all of those jobs they have open.

According to the Patch.com story:

The state Department of Labor began developing OnRamp after officials heard from employers having a tough time finding suitable employees.

Our esteemed Lieutenant Governor echoed their consternation:

“Last year I visited 100 businesses and all of them said ‘I can’t find qualified people,’” said Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno. “And I said ‘how can that be? The unemployment rate is up again this month.’”

A NJ Department of Labor Press release from August 7, 2012 titled “Christie Administration Launches Talent Search Service for New Jersey Employers New Tool Quickly Matches Companies To Skilled Workers also reflects this attitude.

Call it nitpicking, but you’ll notice that their focus is helping businesses not helping unemployed NJ residents. I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything more from the Insane Clown Posse that is the Christie Administration. Somehow, I think they are launching one site, but call the part for businesses to use “On Ramp”, I’m not actually sure. They could be two different sites, but it’s really hard to tell. It really doesn’t matter, the jobs4jersey.com™ URL redirects to the incomprehensible https://webos.dol.state.nj.us/Career/Login.aspx… jobs4jersey.com is easier to remember.

I signed up for the service last week, and have been giving it a chance to magically match me with the perfect NJ job. It’s a very good thing I knew better than to hold my breath.

Overall Design/Ease of Use

I would like to congratulate the Department of Labor for flawlessly translating all of the polished design of a Motor Vehicle waiting room into an online experience. The site design manages to be mildly upbeat, while at the same time depressing. It has the all of the cutting edge feel of a stained Formica chair placed next to a dusty plastic plant. Hipster touches like overly-compressed jpg icons, not quite aligned graphic elements, and poorly executed drop shadows add to the government agency look and feel they must have been going for. I mean, take a look at the logo above… and that’s the most graphic part of the entire site. Pair the “design-is-tertiary” look and feel with an interface plucked straight out of 1997, and you’ll get the idea of what it’s like to visit the site.

On your first visit, you are asked to sign up for an account. Not unusual, but you are required to enter each piece of information twice (because you are stupid, and probably typed it incorrectly) including your Social Security Number (!). Now the SSN is not required, but if you don’t enter it, you get a stern warning that if you don’t something bad might happen. I actually forget what the warning was, but I dismissed it… like a boss. “Outta my face stern warning,” I thought. They also give you the options to sign in using your GMail, AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail, or Hotmail account credentials. Cutting-freaking-edge I tells ya.

If you opt not supply your SSN, there is another pop-up screen that requires you to enter your name, date of birth, and 1 other piece of information like address or phone number. Now they’ve provided a handy-dandy date picker next to the date of birth box, but it pops up a calendar that defaults to the current month, so unless you were born yesterday, you could spend quite a bit of time clicking back through the months of your life, reminiscing about better times I suppose, before you get back to the month you were born. Alternatively, you can just type in that info if your clicking finger gets tired. Once the info is entered, you get the (thankfully short) terms of service that you have to agree to in order to use the site.

Uploading Your Resume

In order to cut down the number of times I have to type out “mildly functional” in the follow paragraphs, I’m going to just abbreviate it MF. By MF I mean: sure it works, sort of, but it could be better.

Your resume is the key to the site, and uploading it is MF. I’m a bit more internet savvy than many other folks out there, and I found myself saying MF many times during this process. Basically it takes a Word or PDF document and machine reads it into the “proper boxes.” The interface is pretty straight forward, and overall the upload function is MF. I envision a lot of very confused people trying to figure out some of the quirks of jobs4jersey.com™. There is no real help on the site. There is a “FAQ” section, but forget contextual help (you know, those little “?” icons or highlighted words that give you help answers right on a page.) The UX was built by coders, with little regard for how a user would interact with the site. This approach works if you are familiar with how the site is built, but unless you were the .asp coder, it’s pretty useless.

Like any machine scanned document, there are bound to be issues, so I’m not going to harp on the odd things that happened to my data. (It didn’t recognize Washington DC as a valid city for example {Insert joke here}) After mucking around fixing the things that needed to be fixed, adding the things that needed to be added (jobs4jersey.com™ REALLY hates formatting), and deleting the things that needed to be deleted, the overall feeling you get is MF. (As a quick aside, it did odd things like added “fireworks” as a skill that I have… what my resume actually says is that I’ve used Adobe Fireworks before. No jobs working in a fireworks factory for me thank you very much.)

Big UX Note: You can’t actually search for jobs with an account if you haven’t gone through the resume building process; it just won’t let you. You can log out, and search using the site without an account, but once you’re logged in, be prepared to go through the WHOLE process before they let you search for a job. Another sign that this site is more for providing information to businesses than for helping actual people find work.

Searching for Jobs

OK, so you’ve got yourself all set up in the system, time to actually look for a job. It’s pretty much what you would expect. A basic form with all of the aforementioned snazzyness of a municipal court waiting room. It too is MF. Since it’s a government site, there is a premium placed on classifications, so there’s a lot of screen real estate wasted on dropdown boxes for “Job Family,” “Occupation,” “Industry,” and “Detailed Industry” which no one will use, but none of them are required, so they’re easy to skip over.

Search Results

Remember when you were a kid, and you had to visit an elderly relative, and you didn’t want to go, but your mom promised cake, but it was dry carrot cake with no icing? That’s what the search results from jobs4jersey.com™ are like: stale at best. Here’s the deal, companies don’t actually post any jobs at jobs4jersey.com™. Rather, jobs4jersey.com™ scrapes other job sites, strips all formatting from them, and spews them back at you as barely readable, arbitrarily truncated blocks of text. Don’t believe me? Check out this listing, jobs4jersey.com™ version on the left, original version on the right:

OK, so the original version isn’t all that exciting, at least is uses paragraph breaks, and had some thought put into it’s layout. The Jobs4Jersey.com™ version does away with all that artsy-fartsy design stuff, and presents the job listing the way it was intended: as a giant block of text, stripped of it’s word spacing and readability. MF.

Search Result Quality

Aside from the bare-bones approach to mechanics and design, Jobs4Jersey.com™ does away with timeliness as a burdensome requirement in today’s competitive job market, presenting the latest jobs from a few days ago as brand new. In it’s job scraping trips around the web, I’m sure it gets tired and stops off someplace for a bit of a rest, but eventually it’ll get that job listing up on the site… sometime… maybe. I compared the listings I got from Indeed.com with those from Jobs4Jersey.com™ for the same search, and well, Indeed.com beat the pants off Jobs4Jersey.com™ for newly listed jobs. In this day and age, a job listing is old in just a few hours, ancient the next day, probably useless after a couple of days.

The Experiment

As a test, I did a quick search on both Indeed.com and Jobs4Jersey.com™.

The Criteria:
Search term: Accountant
Area: Within 25 miles of 08817

Results:
Indeed.com – Newest result posted 34 minutes ago.
Jobs4Jersey.com™ – Newest result posted on August 10, 2012 (7 days ago)

The real kicker is that the “newest job” on Jobs4Jersey.com™ is 34 miles away. 9 miles more than the limit I used. A quibbling little detail, but in NJ, that’s an additional 1/2 hour on a commute, or the distance over a bridge, and into Manhattan. It means something.

Job Leads by Email

I finally received a Job Alert email several days after signing up for the service. I have to say, they were able to carry the look and feel of the Motor Vehicle Agency through to the emails as well, except in the email, EVERYTHING IS CAPITALIZED FOR EASE OF READING. The only graphic elements (handy “Match Level” indicators) were all broken, so there’s that.

Of the 6 leads they sent, I had already seen 6 of them on other sites. As far as matching quality: I had already applied for 1 out of the 6. The remaining 5 were pretty much useless. I don’t have a Pharma background, which is apparently a new requirement to live in New Jersey. The 5 listings all required Pharma or Medical experience, which I don’t have, which means it’s useless for me to even apply. So they sent old jobs, that don’t fit my experience. I’m so glad I joined Jobs4Jersey.com™.

Conclusion

Congratulations on making it to the conclusion section.

Jobs4Jersey.com™ means well. Jobs4Jersey.com™ is just executed poorly. It reinvents the wheel, serving up old content in an ugly new way. I just want to know how much of my money the New Jersey Department of Labor spent on this. It would probably have cost much less to send every job seeker a $20 bill stapled to a letter that said “Use indeed.com“.

Every footer on the site has the following information: “Powered by Focus/CareerTM v1.9.0.41 Copyright © 2012, Burning Glass International Inc.” So Jobs4Jersey.com™ is just a customized interface to a piece of software built by Burning Glass International Inc. out of Boston, MA. I guess I can stop in the next time I get to Boston, and visit my tax money.