Joblish Debuts To Bolster Keyword Searching

What’s the difference between a marketing manager an a product manager? Mark Bielecki is trying to clean it all up with a new site, Joblish, where employers fill out drop-down menus to find what they’re looking for.

Joblish is a system of structured keywords which can be incorporated into resumes, job postings, directory entries and Web sites.

Presented as a series of questionnaires with pull-down menus, it's a way of describing the essential attributes of a person, a company or a job offering an efficient, machine-searchable link between those seeking talent and the talented candidates who want to be found.

As an example, let’s say an the employer wants these four things in a candidate:

- a functional area of engineering;
- the R&D department
- division head reporting to chief executive
- supervising 10 or more people directly.

The employer picks those four attributes from the drop-downs, and generates a code that looks something like this:

joblishDENERBE

Job candidates who fit that criteria will, in theory, have added the code joblishDENERBE to their resumes or LinkedIn pages or elsewhere, and employers searching for joblishDENERBE can find them.

Bielecki himself states an example:

Go to www.indeed.com and search for positions within 25 miles of Chicago using the keywords “Marketing Manager” and “Product Manager”. As I’m writing this, I got 767 hits. If you take one minute to read the summary, click through the job and make a decision whether or not it interests you, it would take you nearly 13 hours just to get to the end of the list. If all those postings were coded with joblish, the searcher could use joblish codes as search keywords. The number of hits would be greatly reduced and the quality of those hits greatly enhanced.

Like so many new ideas, the success of this one will depend on getting a critical mass of both job candidates and employers to use the codes.