Steve's Blog (for Jobseekers & those hiring)

The gist:

I had time during the winter break to do some surfing and decided to poke around a few more job search portals.  One of them, Trovix.com (currently in beta), piqued my interest.  The site contains an interactive tool allowing the candidate to search based on location (proximity search).  Also, the website offers “smart” search capabilities by comparing criteria from the candidate’s profile against criteria from the job listing to provide recommended matches.  This company caters both to the candidate (job search) and to the employer (applicant tracking and candidate search) to match candidates with open jobs. 

For the sake of time, I focused on their job search tools and specifically to the overall search and job mapping functions.  In a future article, I plan to cover the intelligent job matching tools which match profile to req.

The verdict:

I found this site to be innovative, yet could use some tweaking.  For example:

1. Mapping the jobs for locations was useful, but the capability to zero in on these jobs on the map and obtain details directly for each job was missing.
2. A quick tutorial for novices was missing (in other words, while the site has decent functionality, the  help function only provides simplified descriptions of advantages for it’s features – as opposed to detailed how-to’s on how to exploit this site’s capabilities).
3. While I found the selectable criteria useful, I was disappointed by the lack of sortable fields.  I was be able to filter a search to pull up data based on how recent it is, but was unable to sort the data so that the most recent leads are listed first, etc.  This means I either limit the data to a week or a few days, or I have to scroll through countless pages to find the leads I want to look at.
4. For basic job search, I found it tedious that each listing includes the first sentence of the post.  Although not too big a deal, after reviewing a few hundred hits, this can slow up the process.  Coupled with the restriction of 10 hits per page, and this can delay your search significantly.

Again, not the worst job search tool I have seen, but again, a beta is only as good as the input it receives.  My hope is that with some maturation, this tool will be useful for those looking for work.

URL: http://www.trovix.com/

GRADES:

Creativity: B-

Usability (ease of use): C+

Overall Grade: B