The True Cost of Finding Work Without Using a Job Matching Platform

Time

Count the hours that you spent working on your resume. The writing, editing (hopefully), and then setting up new profiles on multiple systems. At that point, add 25-30 mins correcting data that, in theory, uploaded “automatically” from your resume but now your job title is, “Speaks Chinese” and the date you left your last company field contains your last name. After correcting the data, you fill out all of the required profile information and then click “Apply”.
Each job can take you between 35 minutes to an hour if you actually had enough patience to hammer through all of the barriers to entry. That doesn’t even include the time spent if you hustle and add printing costs for resumes and the door-to-door delivery.

Money

Consider the money you spent, if any, and the lost opportunity costs of wasting your time when you might have been doing something else that had actually made you money.

Energy

The emotional and physical energy that it takes to apply for jobs is expensive. Hope and disappointment. The always being “on”. It is similar to dating. And if you’re a Millennial or GenZ, you want to stay optimistic but the let down is emotionally taxing. Right now, this rollercoaster ride is part of our livelihoods. We feel for the job seeker and know that this process is such an energy suck. We know there is a better way.

Digital currency

In the digital era, your footprint is worth millions, or according to Facebook $20. Every time you click “Apply” you give a company all of your personal information and your work profile. Isn’t that weird when you think about it? While you are looking for work, at the very least, some job board company has taken your time and energy and turned it into revenue. And, statistically speaking, an applicant will only get acknowledgment from 20% of the jobs they apply to using a job board.
Every time you apply, you give that application system your personal information. So, not only are you irritated by having to do the same thing over and over again but while you spend hours of your life getting nothing in return, those systems and businesses monetize your data. Not to mention the data that employers and job seekers gave to these companies every time you hit apply, create a profile that they can potentially monetize to sell outside of their business ecosystem. Some of you may not care and feel like it is what it is, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

The Truth

95% of job boards are dressed up marketing platforms. Their goal is to build up the volume to sell pay-per-click for employers offering a job. Most of them started by scraping employers’ online job pages and offering those same jobs on their webpage. This cut the employers’ control of their own employer brand and job offerings out of the equation. Remember, job boards need a huge volume of jobs and applicants. In the job market, that is what it takes to deliver an “experience”. But when it’s a marketing platform, the jobs shown as available may not even exist anymore.
So in the game of free hires, who is really winning?