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Green Jobs

I am pleased to announce the nicest Irish Job board: Green Jobs!

A this is second new job board I am looking at today, and funnily enough the first one was also ‘green’ or perhaps a bit to ‘green’!

Anyway back to Green Jobs! It is again the jobs site owned by the recruitment agency, and the good thing is – they do not hide it a bit! Their Green Search logo is proudly displayed in the header next to the Green Jobs one.

The Green Jobs Design

The design of the Green Jobs web site is probably the nicest site design of all Irish recruitment web sites. Modern, Web 2.0 (and beyond), light colors on the white background, 3D,… what can I say? It ticks all the right checkmarks! It really is a pleasure to look at, and I find hard to write about it, since I just keep starring at the front page. And not only the front page. When you browse around, you find the little graphics in the site that are relevant to the content, and make the site easier to read and follow.

There are some possible improvements on the looks, it could be a bit modernised since some elements are a bit… ‘old’. The latest jobs scrolling make me really nervous since I cannot really read about the job. It’s too quick! Featured employers box ruins the balance, and is over, over,… out-standing. Fonts could be a bit more exiting… But hold on! This is still probably the nicest (Heineken) jobs site in Ireland!

PS. If you are a graphic designer who made those graphics please call me on 076 670 8888 now! I have a job for you!
PS2. In case you are calling from Brasil, there is +353 for Ireland in front of the number…

The Green Jobs Usability

Well,…. there is always a room for improvement. Again, there is only one green button, on one page only that leads you to the job search facility. I think a job site’s main purpose is to show jobs. The Jobs Search should be on every page. I will repeat that. The job search should be present on every page.

SEO of the Green Jobs

Well not much of SEO on the Green Jobs page. There is actually a test you can do on a job site to check how serious contender are they. You just look at the URL of their job posting. If the page where the job is actually displayed does not contain the job name in the URL, in the TITEL, in the META, in H1 Tag, and a few times in the text…. well then that page will not get much relevant traffic from the search engines. You have to ask yourself – why publish something if it will not have any reach?

So let’s see the URL of the job post on Green Jobs:
greenjobs.ie/jobseekers/info.php?jobid=158

Well, you be the judge… My take on it is that they will always depend on Google AdWords for the traffic to their site, and we all know that this is not really sustainable way to run a job site.

Conclusion?

Green Jobs is the nicest little recruitment site in Ireland. It is cute in its simplicity really. Well done and all the best Greens!!!

Categories
CV CV Database Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine

Jobs.ie Hacked

When there is a very negative press articles about our competition, we decided not to comment them. Here s one from the Irish Times, about the Jobs.ie Web site being hacked. It happened to Monster and http://www.irishgradjobs.ie/ only a few months ago. And now Jowbs.ie is hacked as well. Unfortunately the bad news like this are damaging he industry. Here goes the full story about Jobs.ie web site hacked:

Hackers access information sent to Irish jobs agency
PERSONAL INFORMATION supplied by job applicants to online recruitment agency Jobs.ie has been illegally accessed by internet hackers, writes Olivia Kelly.
CVs submitted by the applicants were downloaded in bulk through a non-Irish web address last Thursday.
Jobs.ie would not say how many of its clients had been affected, but said it had now fixed the security breach.
The clients whose information was taken are at risk from identity fraud and “phishing”, where criminals, often posing as a well-known, legitimate company, use the information gleaned to try to extract further personal and financial information from their victims.
It is understood that the hackers used an illegally obtained log-in and password given to employers who are registered with Jobs.ie to access the job applications area of the site. They then downloaded personal information from CVs submitted, along with job applications.
Most of the stolen information relates to archive CVs rather than those of people now looking for jobs.
The company, which is owned by businessman Denis O’Brien, has in recent days contacted those affected to warn them of the possibility that they may receive e-mails from people using their information.
“All of the people affected have been contacted and informed of the situation. We have urged them to exercise extra vigilance with inbound e-mails in the coming weeks to ensure online security,” a spokeswoman said.
The company has informed the Data Protection Commissioner but will not be informing the relevant policing authorities until it has identified which country the hackers’ web address originated in. Jobs.ie was still investigating this issue, the spokeswoman said last night.
Clients of the website affected by the breach received an e-mail last Friday from Huw Taylor of Jobs.ie, bringing their attention to a “security breach” that occurred the previous evening.
“Although this breach was identified and stopped quickly, a small number of CVs were illegally downloaded. Unfortunately, your CV was one of the records taken.
“I understand and apologise for the concern this will cause you, and I want to assure you that we are taking steps to prevent this happening again,” the e-mail continued.
It urged clients not to give any personal information until it had been established the contact was legitimate; never to give out personal banking information; not to share passwords with anyone; and not to open e-mail attachments if the client was suspicious, especially .exe files.
Victims of the security breach who contacted The Irish Times said they had “grave concerns” in relation to their exposure to identity theft.
Jobs.ie, one of the State’s largest recruitment sites, said it had never before had such a breach.
The security breach follows the recent launch by Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan of the “makeITsecure” campaign designed to combat phishing.
© 2008 The Irish Times

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Blogs CV CV Database Jobs Recruitment

Developing a Jobs Site / Job Board

Jobs Sites are fairly straight forward web sites. Not as simple as a pure presentation “shop window” web sites, but there is not that much to it.

Three basic types of registered users:

    Employers
    Job Seekers
    Job Board Admin

There is also a very small number of pages:

    Home
    Search
    Advanced Search
    Search Results
    Full job description
    Application form
    About / Contact

A few more admin pages in the back end of the job site and that is all you really need to get going. Later on you might ad a page for Company Profiles, Quotes, or similar Jada-jada required for the search engine optimization purposes. You might disguise it under eh title Career Resources, or something sounding equally smart.

Any web development company can do it fairly quickly, and if you stick to those basics, it will not cost you an arm end leg. Outsourcing the development to India will save you quite some money as well. And this is the reason we had more than 20 new job sites in Ireland launched in the same year 2007. Imagine 20 new job sites in the market that to anyone in the industry seams overcrowded.

CV Database exposed on the WebThere is only one problem with the job sites, and that is that they are more often than not built so that they store the CV’s of the candidates. This enables the job board owners to sell access to the CV databases. Holding onto CVs online requires a tough security, and if you have been cutting corners while developing your web site, it might not be there. The end results are that job hunters private data gets exposed. Sometimes their application history and sometimes even the full CVs find their way to the web.

Yes we did contact Karl to let him know and he pached the security hole quickly.