I was recently asked the said question from a fairly new connection, and taking pride in my years of recruiting experience, Salesman-led vernacular, current knowledge of the market place – I confidently replied….........!
Okay! Let's STOP right there! How many articles have you read over the years, where the Author professes to know precisely want others want, and based on their anecdotal experience go on to list 'Five things you should know about …' or 'the 98% of employers would...'
The concern is, many of these articles are highly selective, subjective and in many cases unfounded. The accomplished PR, Marketing professional decides to redact any qualitative or quantitative evidence and/or statistical proof of their findings, relying heavily on the graceful craftsmanship of their words or a most obscure poll; knowing full-well that “95% of statistics are made up on the spot”, as was possibly this one! And the merry-go-round keeps turning.
Just for a change, how about an article where YOU get to create the data, YOU get to contribute to it's authenticity and where YOU can truly review the perspectives of others. Interested? Then come along on this journey with me, and I can guarantee YOU a means by which to determine your own truths in your personal and professional life.
So I concluded, my opinion is but a single voice in an entire ocean of people trying to be heard – so why don't I stop talking and start to listen to them! To do so, I will need to get creative, take simple steps and be as methodical as possible. So I developed a web app' to assist me gather and collate all this in formation:
- I started with the HTMLtoText framework: to gather information on selected sites.
- I employed the NLP toolkit: to parse all the information coming through.
- Constructed a basic DB system: to retain all the data.
- I included the google Charts.JS: for presentation.
- ..and tied all char streams together with PHPunserialize.JS: for seamless data flow.*
Voila! Now I had the means to cross reference any data-sets with public information found on the internet. For the purposes of this particular article, I simply used a thousand strong word-list of Adjectives in order to determine the general requirements of jobs listed on our favorite boards.
Demo here: DevCentral.co.nz
Source code: GitHub
In the past, you may have heard statements like “the new employee in the 21st Century is…”,"the quintessential employer is a talent larcenist..” etc.. The true results are much simpler than that and make perfect sense when you take a look at the outcomes. Though differing industries, countries, vocations and specialties all have their set of distributed data-sets; the overall picture shows that Employers simply want employees who are ready, willing and able – more importantly and interestingly for these individual to be social / sociable.
Hey! Well don't just take my word for it; do your own research – enter in a few client led job adverts and try it for yourself. In doing so, you will add to the overall picture and assist in refining the results – eventually adding credence to this article.
If you're not a Software Developer, Statistician, have no formal education or knowledge of sample mean, sample variance, etc.. and rely solely on the empirical; then this whole article will just seem flat-out bizarre to you!!! As the entire exercise is geared to draw people away from relying on evidence created by others, E.g. "A recent study showed.."
Yes, this is a basic application that can be viewed as a step forward in reviewing data or merely as a bit of fun; nevertheless, given the code source for review and development, this simple technology can be extended to review almost anything; the data-set changed to identify ever complex topics and most importantly - quantitative evidence that you have actually done your research, know what you are talking about and can support your argument.
In conclusion, I hope that you enjoy playing around with this app, employ its application responsibly and hopefully learn from it. This is just one of the ways in which iHR IT Recruitment seeks to assist clients and candidates to increase the efficiency of their decision making - leading to a better quality of professional and occupational life. Again, try the app out for yourself, and ask - what are employers wanting from me today?
#Disclaimer:
Please note, this Open Source technology, is NOT a Web-Scraper or Web-Crawler and does not retain any of the index and/or content texts of the sites reviewed. Moreover, this application does not retain information of use, sites visited and merely cross-references known data-sets with web-pages presented.