Headhunter gathers information from candidate profiles and job applications and aggregates it in a report that takes about 30 seconds to generate online. After more people apply, candidates may view updated reports. An employer can also view the information and use it to guide the rest of their search. It is not available to individuals who browse the site, but only job applicants, CareerBuilder says.
For one director of marketing posting in Chicago yesterday, a job competition report showed a wide range of desired salaries -- from $78,000 to $93,000. More applicants had over 20 years of experience and most had a bachelor's degree, though a quarter said they had earned a master's as well. The top alma maters were DePaul, Purdue and Northern Michigan and the most common companies that applicants had experience working at included 3Com Corp., Statement Marketing, and Windy City Inc.
It's equally valuable to job-seekers and employers to compile such reports, says Christian Forman, chief executive of StartWire, which offers job-seekers online tools to track and organize their applications. Eventually, such information could evolve and become a "game-changing" tool to gauge where talented workers are located and where they are needed.
Right away, the reports may help job candidates determine whether their salary expectations are outdated -- and that they may be over or undervaluing themselves. "It's beneficial for job-seekers to get a clear-eyed view of what the market is," Forman says.
Yet the report may not give a full or fair picture of the market, or even the candidates' true experience levels or pay. "What 'the competition' states as their salary level may not be accurate and probably isn't particularly relevant," says Susan Joyce, publisher of career information site Job-Hunt.org. Joyce also argues that there may be legitimate privacy concerns about making this sort of data public. "What else will they do with that information?"
Headhunter.com's Jablow says that the site takes user privacy seriously and that he expects the site and the report to grow and change partly based on users' feedback in the next few months.
Others argue that the site is late to the game or trying to quantify leadership skills with a few data points. "Leadership qualities … are impossible to benchmark in such a mass market approach. I consider this new feature to be more of a bell and whistle, and not something of real value to the executive candidate," says Eryn Feinsod, a spokeswoman for the Association of Executive Search Consultants, which runs a competing site BlueSteps.com. Feinsod also argues that the data in the competition reports will be skewed because it comes through one source only and may include some people who are less qualified for the job.
However, Headhunter is free of charge to job-seekers while competing executive job sites like TheLadders charges users $15 to $25 a month. Except for the job listings, Headhunter will be free of advertising, including pop-up ads, says Jablow.
Headhunter launched with about 2,800 job listings, many of them from CareerBuilder or its seven other niche sites. The site's "sweet spot" will be manager, senior manager and vice president-level positions, and in two or three months, most of the jobs will be unique to the site, Jablow says. By comparison, TheLadders currently has 120,000 job listings, according to Marc Cenedella, the site's CEO and founder.
