Jobazaar Review

July 6th, 2005

Jobazaar is a new take on combining tagging with auction-style job sites. The premise for the site is that an employer makes a post offering up a job, prospect employees join and post their bid onto the job. This is all virtually identical to a number of other job-bid websites - a popular one being Rent-A-Coder. I'm going to review, first, the concept of job bidding and then the value added by this web site.

Job Bidding Personally, I really dislike job bidding. It may seem like a 'great way' to find work, considering that there are so many jobs listed (on popular job sites), but the truth is that in order to actually win a job you have to drop your total bid to a demeaning level. I find that for jobs that I would normally contract out to about $25/hour end up being close to minimum wage, instead - which is highly impractical. Personally, I feel that blind 'auctions' really are a better way to acheive a better result - since no one can know what the lowest bid is, no one can undercut it.

Jobazaar Differences The main difference between Jobazaar and any other job-bidding web site lies in the fact that it uses tags as a categorization system, and I'm not entirely sure if it works as intended. Application developers seem to be missing the fact that tagging does not make for a good 3rd party categorization system. It's good for finding your own items because you're the one writing the tags. You may say 'web' and 'perl', I may cay 'cgi' and 'lamp'. The advantage to having a strict categorization, like what Rent-A-Coder has, is that you know exactly where the jobs are that you want (for example 'Perl > CGI > Databases').

The two aspect of Jobazaar that I like is the fact that you can track job postings in your newsreader, using rss, and that they have a public blog available, soliciting feedback. Both of these are incredibly useful - and a smart decision.

In a nutshell, I don't think that Jobazaar adds that much value to the typical job-bid model, available elsewhere on the Internet, to warrant its existence. Unless it begins to gather a serious userbase (which it doesn't have, at this time), it may be too late for it to work at all.

Tags: jobazaar, programming, review, jobs, tags, tag, business, bid, auction

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