Why do you make it so hard for people to find the one thing they’re looking for?
I’m on ZipRecruiter as I write this — perhaps the best known job site these days — looking for jobs under the category “writer”.
Now yes, many jobs with that key word have come up in the results, but a lot other jobs popping up have been head-scratchers, including Accountant, Security Guard, On-Call Maintenance Technician, Bartender, Full Stack PHP Web Developer, Site Supervisor for a medical facility, Porter (um… cleaner) at Tim Hortons, Experienced Server for a restaurant, Plumber, Crew Dispatcher, Restaurant General Manager, and probably my favourite: Insurance Defence Lawyer.
Yes, you nailed it, ZipRecruiter, I’m an Insurance Defence Lawyer but I’m looking for other work in my field and am trying to find it with a search criteria of “writer”, that’s exactly right.
I went back into the search criteria and started adding “-” for each item in the search results that I didn’t want. So “writer -ai” would theoretically take out jobs that had “ai” in the title (training AI systems to write better is a burgeoning job category these days, but as a writer myself, I’m gonna go ahead and take a hard pass on training your system to replace writers in the future, thanks).
“writer -ai -server” was the next addition, since the results popping up included restaurant servers.
“writer -ai -server -plumber” was the next iteration I tried in the search field, because inexplicably, plumber jobs came up.
It’s gotten to the point where my search criteria is currently “writer -ai -server -plumber -lawyer -technical -grant -administrative -window -bookkeeper -medical -account -sales -nurse -math -cashier -sourcing -food”. But oddities wholly outside those words to be avoided still keep showing up.
Electrician.
Forklift Operator.
Construction Estimator.
Food Analyst.
Why are any of these results generated from a search for “writer”?
It isn’t lost on me, of course, that this may get to the point where I’m literally telling the system every kind of job I don’t want in order to finally have it narrow down the results to “writer” entirely by default because it’s the only thing I haven’t removed in the search criteria.
But then it took another turn: I noticed that words I had put into the search criteria for it to avoid showing results for still remained in the results.
Bookkeeper was the first of them, “-bookkeeper” in the search field didn’t stop it from showing up.
Same as said Insurance Defence Lawyer, despite the “-lawyer” in the search field.
So wait, now even some of the things I want removed from search results are still showing up anyway?
It’s exhausting and needlessly time-consuming for someone who’s on a timeline trying to find useful results of jobs to apply to.
Gosh, if only there was some more elegant way to simply look for a category of work on these sites (ZipRecruiter isn’t alone with these issues) instead of typing in “-” before every other kind of job that exists to not see results that fall outside that wanted category of work.
Dear job search sites: What if… now follow me on this wild concept… what if users could just enter a job search word and only got results directly related to that key word?
Huh… that’s so crazy it just might work!
Guh.
Onward…