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October 16, 2003April 21, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

Calendaring Hell

Further to my earlier rant on employment web sites, I have a beef with community association web sites. Every industry association, trade association, and online community inevitably has an event calendar. The problem is that there is no single source for event information within the Vancouver technology community (or any other community for that matter).

Now I’m not suggesting that it’s either possible or practical for a site such as BC Technology to scour every association and society’s event calendars, and screen scrape the data to get it into their own event calendar. That would be silly. However, we’ve got these new fangled com-pu-ters I’ve been hearing about, and the word on the street is that they’re pretty handy at amalgamating data on their own, provided you give them some common format for exchanging data.

Waitaminute. Computers? Data? Format? That’s sound suspiciously like a prime candidate for an XML application!

Imagine: You’re interested in the local tech community and you know a few sites that have information on the events you care about. Instead of surfing to their web sites periodically, wouldn’t it make more sense if you could simply subscribe to their event calendar from within your calendaring application (for example: Outlook). This syndication of event calendars would mirror the way RSS is currently used to syndicate blogs. The calendaring application would become an event information aggregator, thus freeing me from ever missing an event.

Of course, I’m not the first person to think of this. Those crafty people at Apple were ahead of the game, as usual, when they enabled publication of iCalendar files through their .Mac service. But they didn’t quite take it far enough and were, unfortunately, just too damn smart for the rest of the world to follow suit. Recently, others have started an XML calendar format based on RDF. Here’s hoping they succeed sometime soon, so I can start spending more time at the events than I do trying to find out about the events.

in Technology 1 comments

October 8, 2003April 21, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

Job Search

We’re coming up to our break in between sessions in the final semester of my MBA program, so I’m starting to look around at where I can work once I’m done. I’m feeling less and less certain about which area I want to work in, but more frustrating is the six zillion different places to look for work.

In the past, I’ve always relied on job sites, such as Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, and T-Net, to find jobs. But in the time between my last job search and the present there’s a whole new crop of recruiting sites that have emerged: JobShark, Workopolis, CareerBuilder, Brass Ring, and numerous others. What used to be a simple way to identify interesting jobs and put your resume in the hands of potential employers has degraded to the point that the Internet recruiting sites are no more useful than the newspaper.

For example: for each one of these sites I need to input my resume; however, each one of these sites has a different way to input my resume. Some are simple, simply requiring me to upload my Word-formatted resume, while others require me to fill out a bunch of forms, and make selections from dropdowns. Can you say “time-consuming”? Not only that, each site offers diminishing returns for the expended effort – most of the sites feature the same jobs listings from either the same employer or the same recruiter.

What we really need is some kind of XML resume format that job-seekers can post on their web site or upload to job sites, and that search engines can easily index. This would allow employers to easily find potential employees. On the flip side, employers need some kind of XML job description format that job seekers can easily find through a similar search engine mechanism.

Of course, putting such a system in place would require tools to simplify the task for both parties. The system would also significantly reduce the need for these recruitment web sites; however, given their reduced ability to match jobs with job-seekers, is that really such a bad thing?