KEY POINTS:
Where do you go to search job ads online? At a guess, I'd say anyone looking for a job who is the slightest bit web savvy would be trawling the listings on Trade Me.co.nz, Search4jobs.co.nz (owned by Herald publisher APN) and Seek.co.nz .
But wouldn't it be good if
you could search all of the above and listings from numerous other job listing sites, Government departments, recruiters and company websites?
I think most people would agree that a Google-like search engine that will throw up national results for jobs across all sectors would be pretty useful.
That's the grand aim of Recruit.net, which was described to me as exactly that, the "Google of job sites", by its Hong Kong-based founder Maneck Mohan.
I cruise all the websites listed above in the hope that an exciting new media job might crop up in New Zealand some time. So I went to newzealand.recruit.net and entered "online journalist". No jobs matched my search. That didn't surprise me too much. I narrowed the search to "journalist".
That threw up 12 listings, all of which came from Search4jobs.
Trade Me and Seek prevent third parties from scraping their job classifieds, so they won't appear on Recruit.net.
I changed occupations to one with more promise - I plugged "software developer" into the search engine and Recruit.net came up with 278 matches.
Here it proves its value. Not only does it scrape listings of Search4jobs, but Q Jumpers, Jobs Universe, My Jobs Space, Jobserve and corporate websites like Hewlett Packard and Tandberg. You can also search by company - for instance, HP has 2 positions currently vacant for a .NET developer and a Java developer.
Like the Google model, Recruit.net makes money by charging advertisers to have their job listings displayed prominently in search results. Recruit.net has country-specific job sites across Asia, but as this TechCrunch article points out, it isn't particularly interested at this stage in tapping the competitive US market.
"It's an interesting corporate strategy, not only from the tech/revenue viewpoint but from the complete lack of desire to enter the US market (I understand it, but others with a US focus may not),"write's TechCrunch's Duncan Riley.
All up then, Recruit.net is worth bookmarking if you're in the job market, but its effectiveness is limited, particularly for those looking for IT related jobs without listings from Seek and Trade Me, two of the bigger websites in the online jobs listings space.