Paul Forster, Indeed's CEO, talks about Indeed

Total Picture Radio interviewed Paul Forster, the CEO of Indeed, about how Indeed works. Indeed, if you haven't used it, is a vertical search engine which "scrapes" jobs from major boards and allows you to search those boards from their interface. If you find something you like, you select the job and Indeed takes you to where the original placement of the job--like on Monster--and you follow the posting steps from their to apply.

The interview gives a good overview of Indeed and some of its features, like the Job Trends, setting up alerts, how the search engine lets you search by salary even if not every job posting includes salary information. I also learned about how sponsored jobs works--sounds a bit like Facebook's ads within the social network. They also talked a bit about job scams and phishers on the site and the steps that Indeed is taking to lessen the posts from scammers.

Which is how I found out about the interview, through a post on the Diggings blog which is powered by JobDig. The writer does make a good point that if Indeed didn't deal with places that harbor scammers, like major job boards that do no checks on job authenticity, scamming would be lessened, but that's like saying Google shouldn't return results that would include misleading information.

As a researcher, you should be aware that there are some vertical search engines that aggregate employer job feeds only, like Eluta and vertical search engines that scrape, like Indeed, SimplyHired and WowJobs. Taking employer feeds directly can indicate that these are real jobs--though you also get fewer results. (Researchers know less is more, desperate job seekers just get frustrated.) A submitted feed may also be inauthentic, since it is hard to tell if the search engine has someone who is investigating the authenticity of the the job feeds beyond the initial email of please add our feed to your results.

I think that including tools like map mashups or letting you discover how many times an employer has posted the job and for how long are other tools that will help you discover the authenticity of a job. If there is no mapped location, or the location seems suspect, it's probably not real--as in, using a post office box and not a company address to submit your resume, a tactic that was used by old school scammers that used print classifieds. If a job is frequently posted or runs forever, these are also tip offs that something is wrong, though it could just mean that the job has a high turnover rate, such as car washers.

The interview, however, is good and offers some insights to searchers using Indeed.

Federal Jobs (US)

There is a website for federal service jobs in the US, Making the Difference, which includes advice on writing a resume, the infamous KSAs, as well as a housing guide for the DC area.

There's more about finding a federal job on the NACE Bulletin for August 4th, 2009pt. 2.