Lets face it, job alerts are mainly broken. In this member only post I’ll detail how I would fix them.
Here’s a typical complaint of job alerts by job seekers, Irina from the Boolean Strings blog wrote about it.
Here is my profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinashamaeva. Recently I have been into AI drawing with Midjourney as a hobby, and added it to my profile:
At that point, I got the industry “Graphic Design” in LinkedIn’s thinking. Now for the email:
Is this good news for me? “Graphic Designer” has been quietly converted into “Image Specialist,” which is not a Graphic Designer, and can mean many things, including Radiology.
The most interesting part! In spite of the jobs uptick, we Image Specialists apply to pack the groceries at Whole Foods. We also assist with errands at MAC Partners, but this particular job is closed. I suppose these are my job recommendations if I want to follow the majority of fellow Image Specialists:
And then, more information is added. Perhaps this is even more striking! I have the X-Ray skill, in a sense, lol. But I have not thought of learning Fluoroscopy:
So as you can see above the mere mention of something in her profile triggered a wasteful job alert send. And therein lies the problem. Job boards need to stop sending alerts based on one keyword which may or may not be appropriate.
I’ve seen too many of these complaints over the years. In their quest for more applies, they think ANY job alert is a good idea.
Not true.
All they are doing is giving job alerts a bad name. Even podcaster Joel Cheesman thinks they are bad. Watch this.
So how do we fix job alerts? I would do a few things to make them better.
- I would only allow alerts to go out if the keyword is in the JOB TITLE. The job title is the best way to increase relevancy for the job seeker. Employers are taught to keep job titles simple and use the right keyword anyway so by just using the title you will clean up a lot of junk alerts going out.
- You can take this a step further by adding a category or industry to the alert filter. Let the user enter a keyword and choose the category.
- More SMS and more immediacy. We need more job alerts to go out via text message Using SMS will increase click rates which will lead to more applies. I am still shocked SMS alerts are not more mainstream.
- Alerts should go out as soon as the job gets posted. Those who apply first are more inclined to get noticed. So get those jobs to the candidates as quickly as possible.
- A keyword alert taken from the job description should have multiple mentions of that same keyword. Not just one.
These strategies will go a long way toward better relevancy and more qualified clicks.
