I ran into a couple of new job startups that caught my eye and wanted to provide some commentary on these ideas. First up is a site uniquely called JobsnoteSteve.com.

Not your average job board name but I like the play on words. Its creative. The site itself is built on Indeed.com’s API but it’s aim is to make IT jobs easy to find. The site does this by breaking out a variety of job titles in an A to Z fashion which is a nice touch. The site probably wont be a traffic magnet but techies looking for work may make it a niche site worth using. This is a good example of what you can do with a jobs API that all the big aggregators provide.

Next up is Job Poacher which got a nice writeup on TechCrunch last week. This is NOT a job board. Its a place where job seekers go to to anonymously state their “job wanted”. The site has literally no design which is strange but it does seem more like a feature than an actual business. First to be relevant they’ll need lots of candidates. And as we all know that can be expensive. I like the idea however even if its not much of a step up from the resume section on craigslist. If I were them I’d contact job board software providers about adding JobPoacher as a feature.

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The NY Times has a blog that critiques websites and I stumbled across this post about a site called DirectApproachSolutions.com that claims to be the ‘eHarmony of jobs‘.

The Times asked readers to comment on the site and they gave it scathing reviews but I wanted to chime in as well.

First of all, lets start with the domain name. Its WAYYYY TOOOOOOOOOOO LONGGGGGGGGGG!

The number one rule of picking a domain is to go as short as possible. Nmmber two is getting the words jobs or careers into it somehow. DirectApproachSolutions.com does neither. Nor does it give the visitor an indication of what the site does. Its a generic, unremarkable domain name.

Other problems I noticed:

• The browser title starts with “Job Search NYC”…if it’s a local site the homepage gives no indication of that.
• The logo is boring and generic looking.
• The homepage is text heavy and does not draw the users eye to any one area of the page.
• The premise: the online job search industry is littered with a long list of companies that claimed to be the eharmony for jobs.  Jobster, RealMatch, Climber…to name a few. The idea never really caught on with job seekers or employers.

I just found this cool new tool named Screenr which is awesome for doing screencasts (no software required). So I tried it out by deconstructing a job board for you. You can get a 15 day free trial but after that its a rather pricey $49 per month if you want to able to embed them on other sites.

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