Startups & Online Business

Over the last few weeks I have been perusing the job boards in Australia for a new contract (I have just finished off the last contract and the other online businesses are only taking an hour a day and Im bored).

So the difference between the job sites as a user is incredible and its easy to see why there is a gorilla in the market.

The players are

www.seek.com.au(the Gorilla, first mover and not from a traditional media group)

These guys have most of the jobs and more activity. Their site is easy to use but lacks a few features such as being able to search by pay rate. Its easy to read, the application process is pretty good and so is the account management process.

Overall they revolutionised this market, their site whilst not as usable as some of the newer sites has all the jobs and therefore more job seekers visiting (its a difficult circle to break)

www.careerone.com.au (News Digital)

The search function is ok but lacks search by pay. Overall the site looks unloved. They dont seem to have as much inventory as Seek.

The thing that I really don’t like is that the job headings are completely unreadable when you list them out, they are grey links in a font which is only just a little bit bigger than the description. Easy problem to fix.

Not very compelling.

www.mycareer.com.au

I like mycareer it doesnt seem to have as much inventory as Seek but it is easy to use and has the all important pay search (it is very frustrating searching through 20 pages of $40-100k jobs)

The interface is nice and the fonts are very readable. I like the fact that you can create a job search and then get an RSS feed of it, not sure why everyone doesnt have this.

Overall a good player, if only they could compete on job inventory

www.jobsjobsjobs.com.au(new player)

These guys only launched a few months ago, brave thing to do in a pretty busy market.

I really like their site, its easy to use, its clean and readable, they have implemented some nice new Web 2.0 concepts such as a tag cloud.

You can also redefine your search without starting the search again simply by clicking the Pay, Categories and location options on the right hand side and using AJAX (I assume) it refines the search on the fly. Really easy to use.

They could add an RSS feed.

These guys have done a great job and obviously spent a lot of time on their site working out what worked well on the other sites and building a site that is he best of all the others and much more usable.

Well done guys.

www.thebigchair.com.au (reasonably new from Fairfax/SMH/Age)

This is simply the worst site in jobs in Australia. I have sent some feedback to these guys, hopefully they fix it asap. Here are a few issues. There is no search function (hard to believe) you just need to click job categories or job functions so if you do work that spans both you have to dig down multiple times.

When you do dig down into a job category the job listings are so small and have no description text, you can waste a lot of time to see if they are interesting or not, given that this site is aimed at high flyers this is one thing that they wont waste. When you do find something interesting its quite slow for the display ad to load.

Annoyingly if you want to include other categories or job descriptions you need go back to the very beginning, I have tried to work with this site numerous times but I end up in frustration.

They need to start again.

My conclusion, www.jobsjobsjobs.com.au have the most usable site followed by mycareer..com.au. Having said that Seek has all the jobs so you have no option but to go to them. The big chair and careerone need to go back to the drawing board and completely relaunch.