Jobsket hopes to mix up the job search market

Original Post: Jobsket hopes to mix up the job search market

With today’s job market, even if there are countless job search alternatives to go around, there’s still opportunity to stand out. Jobsket, a small bostrapped startup operating and Spain and Ireland is jumping on the bandwagon in an attempt to solve a number of job search challenges with their platform.

It’s difficult to find an online tool that equally takes into account both the candidate and the hiring parties.  Jobvite, for the companies. Risesmart, VisualCV, are both for the candidate. According to Jobsket, they’re setting out to address both sides of the coin. For now, it appears that they cater more to the candidate.

With social media networking becoming a key factor in landing a new job, you need an effective way to distribute your CV. With Jobsket, candidates can upload their current text/word version or import their LinkedIn or Xing profile, while Jobsket takes care of processing it and make it social. Once processed, you can promote and distribute your uploaded CV on social networks, embed it into your website or spread via email.

Not only that, but Jobsket boasts that the core of their platform–intelligent, automated semantic search technology will evaluate the content of a CV and match a candidate with relevant job opportunities. A time-saver for candidates and hiring managers. They also try to evaluate how much a CV is worth, by comparing it against job openings and average matching salaries. I can only speak for myself–can’t say the results were realistic–not yet anyway. Perhaps Jobsket needs more time and data. In the meantime, it’s an attractive vanity feature. Unless of course your undervalued.

What’s in it for hiring companies? With intelligent matching, they can discover the right candidates, if the candidate marks off the privacy setting making their CV public in Jobsket or even more public, allowing his CV to be indexed. Much like LinkedIn, this opens up the door to passive candidates.  Martín Perez, one of  Jobsket’s founders, tells me that to meet the needs of hiring managers/companies they´re working on a feature set similar to that of Jobvite, wherein jobs can be promoted on social networks in order to attract most suitable talent.

Some downsides worth mentioning: While allowing users to upload their current version of their CV certainly saves them a lot of time, I don’t see where they can edit the uploaded version, making it very inflexible. Companies like Ceevee for example, recently covered on TechCrunch Europe, or VisualCV allow you to build and hence edit your CV any time. That’s not to say that Ceevee has the better slant. If Jobsket can remedy this particular downside, get enough volume, and IF their semantic matching of CVs with jobs can actually work precisely enough to stray job seekers away from traditional time consuming job search portals, they may have something going for them. Otherwise, they may just become a very good CV distribution tool. They plan on a subscription based billing model, so falling into CV processing and distribution alone, will not be enough to attract mass numbers willing to pay.