USAJobs Finally Gets a Web 2.0 Facelift

USAJobs.gov is the federal government’s official job board where all federal government employment opportunities are posted. For the past four or so years, this site has been the go-to for jobseekers looking to become feds. However, the user experience has been pretty lacking. Many jobseekers become frustrated with the user interface and then even more frustrated with all the requirements and hoops one is required to jump through in order to get a government job.

Then on January 25, 2010, all that changed…we hope. USAJobs got a major facelift intended on making finding and applying to government jobs more simple and enjoyable. The most striking change on the site is the homepage. Below are a before and after of the site. You can see that the old homepage (top image) was very cluttered and full of links and images. For folks used to using job boards, this looks pretty standard…especially when you see the after screen shot (bottom image).

The new homepage looks a lot more like Google.com than Monster.com. Users still have the option to search careers by agency, pay grade, or location, but the new, cleaner homepage directs jobseekers to the place where most start their search anyway…the basic keyword search. The average job seekers starts his job search on USAjobs (or any job board for that matter) simply by entering in a keyword and a city. So why keep confuse job seekers at this point if this simple search is what they want to do first anyway.

Web 2.0 Additions

Other than the cosmetic changes to the site, USAJobs now incorporates several powerful social media tools that bring government recruiting into the 21st century. The first big social media tool is the new “Share Job” option found a the job details page of every posting. This tool lets job seekers share a job they are interested in on various social media platforms like Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook and AIM. But USAJobs has taken this idea of sharing and really expanded it. Users can share a job via more than 220 social sites.

The next big step is the addition of an RSS feed. This is possibly the most important Web 2.0 addition to the new USAJobs site. Until now, federal agencies had no way to aggregate job opportunities to external recruiting sites (job boards like CareerBuilder, Dice, etc.). Because of this if a federal recruiter wanted to expand the candidate base for an open requisition, he or she was required to manually cut and paste the job description to the desired advertising vehicle. Because of that, most federal job openings were only seen by the 2 million monthly visitiors that use USAJobs…no where else. Having RSS capabilities is going to seriously help expand the talent pool open to the government. This is again important due to the aging federal workforce. In order for the government to backfill jobs left open by retirement, it will have to attract a new generation of job seekers. This RSS will allow agencies to automatically feed their jobs to job aggregation boards, LinkedIn, Facebook and others just to name a few.

Another powerful feature of the RSS feed on USAJobs is how much a user is able to filter it. Users can get a feed of all jobs in say Des Moines, Iowa or only contracts management jobs or say jobs within a certain pay scale across three agencies he is interested in working for.

So, that’s the new USAJobs site. Keep in mind there is still a lot of work that needs to be done on the recruitment process within the federal government. At least now job seekers have a better tool to use when looking for careers in the government. When the job search process becomes easier, employers will see a better calibre of candidates.

Source : http://socialmediarecruitment.com