Some months ago I decided that it was time for a change. I have been at LatPro for more than 5 years now and while I love the team and the product, I am seriously in need of some change. It’s just who I am. I have never been for so long with one product and I have reached the point where I need a different product and a different challenge –if possible multiple challenges.
So I talked with Carolina first and with Eric afterwards and as I am not sure what path I want to take in the future -if I want to work independently or for another company-, I offered a transitional period of three months so they could find someone else to replace me and/or we could re-assign with calm part of my tasks to some other members of the team.
That period is coming to an end so even when my plans are to take at least a couple of sabbatical months, I decided to polish my resume and get it out there into some other job boards, just in case…
Of course I already have accounts in a good number of job boards because I am always doing benchmarking for LatPro, but in some of them I had a profile without a resume (CareerBuilder) in other cases I had the resume but not public (Monster).
Following my own advice -I always recommend jobseekers to use one or two of the general job boards and one or two niche board like us- I decided to get my resume in CareerBuilder. Mamma mia…, WHAT a mistake!
First, I had to enter it twice, by some reason the first time wasn’t saved. Then right after I hit “save” I got an ad, an interstitial, so I have to click on the “no thanks”. Ten seconds later I got an email through CB that was one of those general blasts from companies no matter what your resume looks like.
As they have an option where you can choose to stop a specific company/recruiter from seeing your resume or sending you emails, I clicked on “block recruiter” promptly. Next day, same email. I blocked it again. Next day, same email, I blocked it again and I contact their support team asking how I was getting those emails if I had blocked the recruiter not once but 3 times…. And guess what? I never got an answer!
This is just half of my bad experience with Careerbuilder, but after some more blasts offering jobs that had NOTHING to do with my profile I decided that enough is enough and I made my resume private with them. Not good enough. When I receive their job agents, if I click on any job listed there, I got a pop under…. So I think I may kill my account there. I am not desperate looking for a job, and I find the whole experience so awful, that is not worth my time.
Monster on the other hand, is not SO bad. Still, I have an interstitial each time I login, what once again means losing my time clicking for the 10th time in “no thanks” (no thanks, guys, I have said it like 20 times already, I am not interested in a University of Phoenix degree, give me a break!) and the quality of jobs there goes from pretty decent jobs to things that seem more spam and/or scams than real jobs. HotJobs also has a lot “work from home” and fishy offers, but at least does not bother you with interstitials or popunders.
Comparing this experience with LatPro, where you will never find an interstitial, where we do not have a “block a recruiter” because we know that if the recruiter grabbed the email there is little we can do but where we have an opt out option so people get out of blasts, where each company posting has to fulfill some quality assurance levels, where there are no fishy “work from home opportunities” and where customer support answers in 24 hours… I love our product more than ever!
Of course LatPro targets professionals, and that makes us different from Monster and Careerbuilder, so it makes sense that they may not care in being more picky with the job offer they published as we are, but there is no excuse for their disrespect for the jobseeker when it comes to the search experience.
I guess that if you are extremely desperate for a job, you may not care how many times you have to click in a “no thanks” page to get to see jobs, nor do you mind getting offers that have nothing to do with your profile or 20 pop unders open after seeing the same amount of jobs. And I do understand that job boards are not charities and they need profits, but if Careerbuilder wants to live just from advertising, I will be looking for a job somewhere else.
Why don’t I talk about any direct competition of LatPro? Because there is none. I tried another job board that supposedly targets Hispanic professionals and I got once and again the same jobs through their agent and they also seem to be more about advertising than anything else.
So, so far I will stick with searching at LatPro, Monster, HotJobs and networking of course. Did I tell you? I loved LatPro as a product before I started working here, I have seen it improving by developing more tools and services during my 5 years here, and I may be leaving but I still love the product. Is simply one of the best if you want to search for good jobs and you want an answer each time you have a question!
