Metadata is the New Job Description & Resume

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently going through the job seeker process on some of the bigger job sites on the web – monster.com, careerbuilder.com, dice.com, hotjobs.com – and one common theme is that everyone still relies on Job Descriptions as the one piece of data that represents the job.

What would be more valuable to the consumers of job data – job seekers and job posters (employers) – would be to have richer data surrounding a job – metadata. The Recruiting Animal, FRACAT, and jobster talk about this.

Metadata would include

• in depth tagging
• assigning categories to different aspects of a job (company size, industry, etc)

There are many benefits to building metadata around jobs and job seekers

• better searching for jobs
• better for matching job seekers to jobs and employers
• Metadata helps to bridge the semantic gap
• better for SEO to have jobs and resumes appear in Google Search
• more hierarchical data
• normalized job data
• association with other types of media with similar metadata – ie a job tagged “silicon valley” could be associated with images from flickr tagged “silicon valley” so that users see images associated with the area.
• similar jobs easier to categorize

Image galleries online made the move to metadata a long time ago (flickr). Mail made the move to metadata recently (gmail and ‘Labels’ on incoming email). Everywhere on the internet we are seeing metadata and tags. It’s about time we start associating this kind of data with job. Check out the meta data we gather in our matching process at roundpegs.com.