[BigglesZX]

I've toyed with this question myself during a recent job search. I loathe traditional job sites as they're usually filled with recruitment agency guff, vacuous job descriptions that often fail to mention salary, location, and so on.

For me at least, the most important things I want to know about a company are unfortunately often the hardest to quantify: what's it like to work there, what's the atmosphere like, what sort of clients do they have and what sort of new work do they like to attract? My paramount concern is fitting in, having fun and getting excited about work every morning, because that's the only way I'll get out of bed.

I came up with a list of things that I'd have as rules on my "perfect job site", and they including things like "must mention actual company name (not just the recruitment agency)", "must give accurate location", "must give accurate salary" ('competitive' doesn't mean anything - competitive with whom?) and "must include job title". Too often do I read postings and come away with no idea of what I would actually be doing if I were to take that job!

Hope that helps!

Edit: I'd also say describing the size of the company is important to me. I'm looking to move up the ladder right now and that involves only considering companies above (say) 20 people. I went to an interview a couple of weeks ago for a company with a very nice website indeed - they came across very well indeed and had lots of interesting clients - but I discovered that I was to be employee #4. Great guys, but I wouldn't have gone along if I'd known that up front, and saved everyone some time.

[tom_b]

Wish I could give you more points for "must mention actual company name (not just the recruitment agency)"

One of the ways I even find out that a company exists and uses technology <insert your favorite> is to look in the job listings in my area.

Do non-tech job boards wind up with the same amount of recruiter spam I see at the big boards? Or is it some magical artifact of tech recruiting that has staffing companies chomping at the 20% bit of salary to do placements . . .

[mtoddh]

I had the same annoyance with all of the 'company confidential' jobs ads on Monster, craigslist, etc. as well.

My solution was to develop a web crawler that scrapes job adds directly off of the 'careers' pages of company websites. This way I know their not fake ads and I can gather information on each of the companies that I care about, like number of employees that work there, awards the company has won like Best Place to Work, etc...). I wrote up a quick front-end to search the results - and voila - it's a way to bypass a lot of the job boards/recruiter spam entirely.

[BigglesZX]

That sounds fantastic! Is it released anywhere?

[mtoddh]

I have it set up at www.neekanee.com. I generally do scraping runs about once a week. I'm using MySQL's fulltext search on the back-end so it will only let you search for words with 3-chars or more right now (ie, searching for 'c' won't work but 'java' will..).

[BigglesZX]

Thanks. I wonder that too! I am not a fan of recruiters at all, so I have a massive bias there I'm afraid, but it seems that all the companies I want to work for (i.e. midsize, startup or post-startup, cool work for hip clients) eschew recruiters completely and only advertise directly.

I just find it SO annoying when searching for companies that they're all "leading <city> digital agency" and I have no idea who that actually is. Same gripe for "competitive salary"!

I'm only familiar with tech jobs, but experiences of friends in other industries seem to tell the same story - i.e. a carpet-bombing approach to any poor candidate who will listen!