Disemployed - One Nation, Underemployed

At some point in the past week, the number of sources being searched by Disemployed passed one hundred. The front page currently says 107, but two of those have changed formats since being added and are no longer being searched properly. If you’re interested, I keep a list of sources I need to fix. But fixing those isn’t a high priority right now, as my immediate aim is to have at least one source in every state. If you’re interested, I also keep a running tally of per-state totals. By my count, 26 states still have no sources, which means I’m just under half way towards my intial goal.

You have:

• an interest in improving job search tools
• an interest in programming, specifically PHP, MySQL, XML and other web technologies
• time

I have:

• an opportunity to help people find jobs
• an opportunity to work on a functioning job search project
• an opportunity to work with interesting technology
• profit sharing

To be clear, I’m not offering a wage or salary of any sort, but rather a portion of any income generated by Disemployed. As income is not at all the goal of Disemployed, this should not at all be the motivation for joining Disemployed’s staff. I’m looking for someone who wants to help people find jobs and has at least the bare minimum technical skills to do so. I can teach you technology where needed, but I can’t teach you to care about unemployment. If you’re interested, please email me.

I added a bunch of sites from New York and Missouri, by popular demand (i.e. searches I noticed). I also made a pretty icon (if I do say so myself), created a bug, and then fixed the bug. I’m just going through the states as I see them show up in searches, so if you do a location search and it returns nothing, come back in a week or so and I will probably have it added.

The first incarnation of Disemployed had an employer review section. I never really cared for the system, as it seemed too easy to abuse. But people still come to Disemployed looking for employer reviews, so I intended to eventually recreate the section. However, today I found an entire site dedicated to employer reviews, so now I am redirecting people who load the old Disemployed employer review section to JobVent.

Since I last posted an update here, I added 13 sites from Arkansas to the job search pool, and 2 from Colorado. I also added Disemployed to A9’s new OpenSearch tool, which lets you get results from many different search engines through a single search. For example, you can currently use A9 to search for jobs on Disemployed, Indeed, Feedster, JobCrawler.it (Italian), nioh.jp (Japanese), and LatPro (Spanish) all at the same time. Hopefully more job search engines will start using the OpenSearch format.

I simplified the search. There is only one search field now where before there were two: one field for keywords and one for location. Now anything after the word “in” is automatically treated as a location. This will hopefully make the search a little easier to use.

I also added some newspapers from Arizona to the mix. Eleven states down, thirty nine to go. And then I start round two.

I added more jobs - about a hundred in both Oregon and South Carolina and about two hundred in Mississippi. I expect the total will be about four thousand when tomorrow’s jobs are added. There are now jobs in ten states. So at this rate, there should be about twenty thousand jobs on Disemployed after my first pass through each state. Then I’ll start actively seeking users, and the real fun will start.

I received the first suggestion for an additional site for Disemployed to search. The site was the Grand Rapids Press, which is hosted by MLive, a Michigan-wide newspaper site. Unfortunately, MLive is hostile to search engines. I won’t go into the technical details here, but the MLive website design makes it difficult to be indexed by search engines. So I won’t be indexing MLive on Disemployed. In an attempt to make up for not adding the requested site, I have added several other Michigan newspapers, bringing the Michigan total to about 350, and the (not quite yet) grand total to about two thousand. Next stop (unless otherwise requested): Oregon.

I have doubled the number of sources and jobs to 12 and about 1200. Most of what I added was from California. My original plan was to go through the states in alphabetic order, but after compiling a list of newspapers in Alaska, I thought maybe it would be better to go through the states in order of unemployment. Then after compiling a list of newspapers in the District of Columbia, I noticed that people had made a few searches already. I decided to focus on the states people are actually searching rather than high unemployment areas where people might find Disemployed useful. One search for ‘paralegal’ in California returned no results, so I started adding newspapers from California. After adding about six hundred jobs in California, it still returns no results. There are a lot of newspapers in California, and I’m confident there’s a paralegal job ad in one of them. And if not, I’ll at least add a bunch of jobs to Disemployed looking for it.

Disemployed is now (re)open for adventurous testers. Those who witnessed the death of the first incarnation of Disemployed know that everything it did was done better by Indeed. So the basic plan this time is to cover the jobs Indeed misses - jobs from small towns that don’t show up on the major job search engines.

Everything should be roughly functional. There are currently only about six hundred jobs listed, mostly from small towns in Illinois. My plan from here is to gradually add job sources and fix any problems that early testers point out. Once I have at least one source in every state and I’m confident there aren’t any major problems with the site, I’ll open up Disemployed for general use.