One of the great things about the internet is that it brings down the cost of information distribution (among a couple other things), and many businesses can be based on that simple fact alone.
For example, in today’s NYTimes there is an article describing sites that allow users to get a better idea of what a particular job will pay. Not only does this help job seekers and employees engage the job market with crucial information, it’s also a really great way to get users to use your job search site.
The shame is that the article never mentions the most usable of these sites: Indeed.com, which is my own favorite reference point.
Instead the article focuses mainly on Salary.com and PayScale.com. Both of these sites require the user to provide all sorts of information that I, as a user, am not interested in providing. As a user, all I’m interested in is answering the question: how badly am I being underpaid?
Indeed.com is far simpler. A look at the three home pages should help make my point.
Indeed gets to the point
Salary.com has lots of branding to do, but the main application is buried in the page
PayScale seems simple, but first you have to identify yourself, and then what’s this about a report …?
These screen shots show you can do far worse than just being as simple as possible. The internet, after all, gave us reduced information acquisition costs. Why muddy up the purity of that with marketing? Let simplicity and ease of use speak for you.
And Indeed follows through in the search results.
No reports, no profile, just what I asked for.
As always, thanks for listening.
~alex
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Nice one Alex. Never heard of any of these sites before but agree with you now that indeed.com is indeed the most usable. A great service.
Dugg and blogged!
Thanks Greg. I hadn’t heard of your blog before. Very interesting.
Thanks Greg. I’m glad you find the salary search tool useful. We really appreciate that bloggers spread the word about Indeed.
Rony
co-founder, Indeed.com
That’s great that it was easier to Indeed but the data is horrible compared to what Salary.com offers. What’s the use in getting data quickly if it’s inaccurate? Might as well just throw some darts at a board if you want a quick answer.
Alan,
You make an important point – that any application, for it to be useful, must have accurate data. Obviously there are shades of accuracy, but the more accurate, the more useful the application becomes. I didn’t touch on this in my blog post, but it’s an important point. Thanks for making it.
Indeed’s salary data is extracted from actual job descriptions posted in thousands of places on the web. So, the data is as good as the salaries that people put into job descriptions. All in all pretty objective, although of course there is a margin of error with any methodology. Indeed’s Salary Search actually displays a confidence level based on the number of jobs the salary figure has been derived from:
high confidence High Confidence (more than 250 sources)
medium confidence Medium Confidence (75 to 250 sources)
low confidence Low Confidence (under 75 sources)
Alan – your comment was anonymous – do you work for Salary.com?
Paul
CEO, Indeed
AlmostSwiss - Blog & Travel Journals » Indeed, Usability Works // Feb 7, 2009 at 6:15 pm
[...] UsableMarkets has introduced me to a handy tool with this post. He has found a usable salary finding solution that allows you to simply enter the job title you want to know about and it immediately pops back a list of possible jobs and salaries for them. If you are in the states you can even narrow it down by state. [...]