You’ve learned how to Google, but do you know how to JoPit?

Search engine designed solely for jobs could revolutionize the way people look for, and employers post, jobs

Yahoo and Google changed the way people surf the Internet, indexing billions of web pages in an effort to make it easier to find information in the ever-expanding electronic sea.

A British-based company is hoping to have a similar impact in transforming the way employees look for, and employers post, jobs in the information age.

JoPit.com, named using the first initials of its four founding investors, bills itself as a search engine for job postings. What makes the technology particularly interesting to HR practitioners is that it will go out and scoop jobs off corporate websites and make them available to jobseekers using the job search engine — and there’s no charge to employers for doing so.

Employers simply register with the search engine and give permission for it to “spider” its corporate web pages containing any job postings. Openings are then automatically added to the database on a daily basis.

“We’ve had an awful lot of agencies and corporate companies that have submitted their boards,” said Paul Chantry, the managing director for JoPit. “They see it as a way, in effect, of getting a direct relationship with the applicant without having to go through large job boards.”

The site is relatively Googlesque in its design, and is meant to be a simple search engine that targets jobs. It’s not a job board in the traditional sense, and has no interest in competing with the likes of Monster and Workopolis, said Chantry. This type of search technology will only augment major job boards by driving more traffic to them, he said.

“We’re not going to replicate those systems because that’s what (they) do very well,” he said. “There’s always going to be room for job hosting and the types of services they provide.”

What JoPit will do is scour the Internet — including job boards — and compile the jobs it finds into a searchable database. Visitors to the site can do a Boolean search using keywords, limiting searches by job type and geographic areas.

Since the site is relatively new, and the company has focused on the United Kingdom and the United States, it doesn’t have a strong Canadian connection yet. The only way to search for a job in Canada is to enter a city name as a keyword — Canada has yet to be added to the drop-down list of geographic areas. Only the U.K., the U.S., Europe and Asia are currently listed.

“In the beginning, we seeded the spider with 100 or so job boards we thought were interesting, mostly large American and British ones,” said Chantry. But as word spread, more and more individual employers have registered, and there are a number of Canadian firms among the ranks already.

JoPit doesn’t charge anything for the postings or the spidering. It makes its money by letting employers sponsor keywords — similar to what’s seen on Google — as a way to generate more traffic and interest for specific jobs if their free listing isn’t making it onto the first few pages of the search.

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