On Monday I met with Chris Hill and Brian Knoth of My Perfect Gig. Their venture-backed company is setting out to revolutionize the way engineers find jobs and the way employers find engineers. This truly represents a breakthrough in job search, so I hope we can find a way to offer their service through ENGINEERING.com.
What My Perfect Gig does is aggregate all engineering jobs that are posted on the Internet in the USA every day. So far, this is no different from many other services. What they do next is unique. They parse the job description into it’s required skills and attributes, such as “5-10 years experience”, “masters degree”, “self-starter”, “Solidworks”, “asic design”, etc. By doing this word tagging exercise, they can create a smarter search paradigm.
Enter the job seeker. He or she can select key words describing their skills from a “tag cloud” (a grouping of related words presented in a cloud rather than list format). While selecting from the tag cloud to describe themselves, the job seeker is presented with an ever narrowing list of jobs available. Not only does this service drive superior matches to jobs, it also can suggest skills that are in demand that the engineer might want to acquire.
For the employer, the filtering system can also provide relevant feedback on the universe of candidates. As the employer adds more skills or attributes to the job requisition, it tells the employer how many candidates exist for their job and where they are located.
All of this type of matching can be done anonymously until either the job seeker or the employer request an introduction.
My brief description does not do justice to the supremely cool application that My Perfect Gig has developed. Hopefully, we will be able to conduct a demonstration for you soon.
If you have comments or questions about this, please post them below or feel free to email me at jhayes@engineering.com.
John