Beyond Method #4; Employment 2.0

Based on my own recent job-hunting experience as well as the sampling of job search engines I visited for this exercise, I worry that the free online tools and resources available to the average job hunter require a level of information literacy they might not possess. Job search sites often display or regurgitate so much information that anyone using them could easily feel overwhelmed regardless of whether they're comfortable with computers. The mix of ads, sponsored information and actual search results — coupled with design that often does not engender a sense of authority or credibility, nor a clear sense of purpose, such as Job-Applications.com — easily overwhelms and confuses.

That's one of the trade-offs of using free tools. At the same time, precisely because of their no-cost approach (relying on advertising instead), that's also why they're enormously popular. In the case of sites that partly rely on employer-submitted listings, that popularity breeds access to greater amounts of user-submitted data, further cementing the cycle of popularity. And these sites definitely make an effort to draw people back through useful features like subscribing to email updates and filtering by location, salary, degree level, etc. It is our responsibility as librarians to both make job seekers aware of sites like these while educating on some of the pros and cons of using them.

The Goodwill Community Foundation’s Computer Basics page was an amazing resource, one I've bookmarked and plan on sharing with my library's patrons. I think what makes these tutorials so helpful is that they are presented in short, digestible nuggets. We still get patrons who have never used a computer or created an email account. Computer Basics uses conversational, accessible language to demystify technology through both word-based and video-based tutorials, targeting both people who learn better by reading and those who feel more at ease watching and listening.

At my library, we've got computer classes scheduled in the fall that will serve to education anyone on the basics of getting started with Internet browsing and searching, emailing and desktop publishing. These are skills job seekers will find immediately relevant to their search. Also, I am compiling a collection of online computer tutorials, both word- and video-based, to post on the library website for those patrons who can't make the computer classes or don't wish to attend.

It'd be great if we were able to schedule private tutorials with patrons in order to address their specialized technology needs — we try to offer what one-on-one assistance we can with users of our public computers — but at this time I believe our staffing levels don't allow for more personalized service. In addition, perhaps in the future my the library could create or assign a separate room for extended-use computers. Currently our time management system only allows patrons on for an hour at a time; job applications frequently require more time than that. It'd be nice if we could offer job seekers a quiet room with extended computer time to make their job search that little bit simpler and easier.

Photo by Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library available through a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.