- Anthony Cohen
The Australian Government’s Job Hub — A Good Start.
A lot of people have been asking me about the new Job Hub the Australian Government announced yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, check out dese.gov.au
I absolutely welcome this initiative — I want people employed. I want them supporting themselves and their families. This isn’t a competition; I’ve been lobbying for the Government to do this for the last few weeks.
I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about the role of #ProjectDisplaced now that this Job Hub exists. I was thinking about what do we do differently, and how can we even possibly collaborate (we sent them an offer, and I’m still waiting to hear back).
I know the Job Hub is a work in progress, but this is what I found:
This is a good start. But it doesn’t go far enough. I want them to deliver much more to the hundreds of thousands of job seekers out there.
Listing a job takes time and manual intervention. I imagine the Job Hub will get better as time goes on, but right now the only way an employer can list a job on the Government Job Hub is to call (and wait on hold) or email the Department. #ProjectDisplaced allows employers to create an account and list a job themselves for free, in just minutes.
The Government Job Hub is focussed on employers not job seekers. As a job seeker, you cannot register your details or upload your resume on the Government Job Hub. You can on #ProjectDisplaced, for free (and other commercial job boards, including on @LinkedIn). You can also set up a job alert so that you get notified of jobs as they’re posted, and that is .
Nobody is vetting the jobs that are on the Job Hub. We know how frustrating it is to land on a job page, click on a job to apply for it, only to find it has closed. I know this sometimes happens on our site because the rate that jobs are filling far exceeds the rate at which employers are closing the job on the sites they’re advertised on (if at all). But we have a team of exceptional volunteers who are constantly checking that a job is at least alive when it is posted — we’ve seen jobs on the Government Job Hub that are posted without even checking that the job is still in fact, open.
The customer experience is frustrating the job seeker. I applaud the businesses, large and small, that are posting their jobs on the Government Job Hub. Unfortunately the vast majority are still paying scant attention to the Customer Experience. And in this case the customer is the job seeker. By and large, when you click on a job link, you land on a company’s home page or career home page. You then have to spend considerable time trawling the search function to find the 1,000, 5,000, 20,000 jobs the media are telling you they have. Many, many job seekers are telling us they just walk away in frustration.
The links don’t always go to the jobs that are available for the many. My volunteers are spending hours doing that trawling before we list a job. It’s not a perfect science. It’s manual as anything and we might sometimes miss something, but the vast majority of our links take job seekers right to the job that they’ve heard about. Time is precious. Looking for a job is tough work, but it doesn’t need to be made harder by only taking you to a landing page; and then having to figure the rest out yourself.
There is no free job seeker support. Finally, critically, we have an exceptional group of qualified HR and recruitment professionals who donate their expertise and time, giving all our job seekers free one-on-one resume advice and interview preparation. All you need to do is register on our site, and take advantage of the free resources and expertise we offer.
We are buoyed by the many messages we’ve received, and the groundswell of support from individuals, recruiters, employers, and media. It all spurs us on to continue doing everything that we can to get people into jobs.
We do this for free. We volunteer all our time. We pay for our platform out of our own savings. And most importantly what we offer is a level of free support and a care for our job seekers that simply isn’t evident in the new Job Hub, yet.
Right now, what they’ve started is good! Well done to the Australian Federal Government. What you have created is much needed but as any job seeker knows; with a Government site and department, there are things they simply can’t provide because they don’t have the resources. Things that I and my team can deliver.
My advice to job seekers: Absolutely use the new Job Hub, but remember: Don’t just look in one place — explore all job search avenues to give yourself the best chance of success during these very challenging times.
Ant Cohen is the founder of #ProjectDisplaced, a not for profit movement to match job seekers to urgent work during the COVID-19 crisis. You can learn more about the Project or join for free as a job seeker or employer by clicking here
Published By Ant Cohen on LinkedIn