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Search function job boards reviewed (part 3)

The Search Engine Result Page on job boards

Jaap van de Putte, 2 use it | Date: October 20 2008

Full article:  searching-a-job-online-part3-200810.pdf

Previous articles: Introduction to the study and The Ideal Search Interface for Job Boards.

Job boards are the favourite place for job seekers. But are they really useful to them? In this article we report on our research of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) on job boards. We compare the SERPs of 9 job boards with a checklist we developed for this specific purpose.

The perfect Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for job boards

Based on our own research we formulate the following criteria for an optimal SERP:

  1. The search box - input field with search button - is above the results. Less preferable, the box is placed on the left or the right of the results.
  2. The search query is in the search box and is adaptable.
  3. The job title is clickable and leads to the full job description.
  4. There are at least 4 vacancies visible (screen resolution: 1024 x 768).
  5. Each result has a summary of more than 100 characters.
  6. The date format is universal.
  7. When there are 0 results, the site shows tips for better search.
  8. Results can be sorted by relevance and date.
  9. The elements of paging are big enough.
  10. Refinements can be made easily.
  11. The results agree with the search query (there are no false positives or false negatives).

Requirement 11 - no false negatives or false positives - was too time consuming to study fully, so we decided to drop this in our findings, but we discuss the item in the article inself.

How well do the SERPs of job boards comply to the requirements?

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total performance
Indeed.com  100 %
Monsterboard  80 %
Jobtrack  60 %
Intermediair  50 %
Nationale Vacaturebank  40 %
Jobs.ac.uk  n.a. 30 %
AcademicTransfer  30 %
Stepstone  30 %
Werken bij de Overheid  30 %

Conclusions

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is a difficult page to make user friendly. It is a loaded page with a lot of information and it is a tough job to make it usable. Nevertheless, there are some sites that present a fairly good SERP.

We listed 11 requirements for a good SERP. In our study we assessed 10 of them on the 9 job boards.

There are some easy-to-fix improvements, for example the use of a summary for each vacancy and the use of a universal date format. Some requirements will be more difficult to implement, like the use of intelligent refinements.

However, we can conclude that for job boards there is still a lot to improve.

Download the full article

pdf-icoontje searching-a-job-online-part3-200810.pdf (PDF-bestand: 338 kB)

Next articles

In the next articles we will discuss the the detail page (result page), personalisation and the overall functionality of the boards.

For our English readers: We have just recently decided to publish some of our articles in English. Unfortunately we did not complete the site translation into English. We apologise for the inconvenience.

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