Online job portals & job seekers

After COVID19 pandemic took the world over, people faced various losses in every sphere of life whether it’s business, life or jobs. Everyone was just thinking how to be alive and how to protect self, family, friends and relatives from this deadly virus. Apart from the COVID19 infections and death rates, the job loss was also a challenge to face, and young people in lacs lost their jobs and were in a total dilemma. Some faced the challenges and some lost the battle and chose the wrong path; got addicted to drugs, and in certain cases committed suicide. But few survived and encouraged others to stand firm and that showed everyone the way ahead.

Apart from the companies and organizations started the WFH (Work from Home) procedures. Some of the organizations terminated various employees due to business losses and in view of insecurity of future. As J&K was already barred from high speed internet and were not in a position to introduce WFH, many of the people faced terminations, and job losses, leading to high rate in stress.

Biggest challenge was then to seek new job opportunities, when things were slowly coming back on track. The only solution in everyone’s mind was going for online job seeking, and for employers to advertise in online job portals. We are all aware of various job portals like LinkedIn, Shine, Fresher World, Times Jobs, Gulf Jobs, Jooble, Taleo etc. Even the social media sites have introduced the place for recruiters and seekers to apply for jobs online. Deep inside following new trends of applying and providing jobs online their always remains a challenge of being cheated, theft of data (salary information, Bank Information etc.) as we remain suspect in both ways; if the company is genuine, and if the job seeker is providing correct information. Because in the online job applications the human resource (HR) is virtual and automatic. AI systems are interacting both ways. Their remains less interaction in person with HR and everything remains limited to online text, graphics and virtual reality. Clear mode of selection procedure is not available apart from having few questionaries online and details of our CV.

Rise in cyber-crimes rate have created suspicion, and everyone is seeking the authenticity of the job providers/recruiters and the main loophole is among the social media sites where anyone can post the job without providing any legal documentation of firm, or organization to the OEM of social media. A good percentage of job seekers leave the applications half way due to the reasons of lengthy procedures, sharing of more personal information and delay in response from recruiters because there is no clear one stop meeting point, a dedicated HR person who will provide response for application in one go. Recruiters don’t provide any instant feedbacks about reviews and responses, the job seeker just gets a notification email from the portal.

Next challenge for online jobs in various portals remains the addition of more features and priority to get response from recruiters. Some advertisements and information updates are more annoying to us.

The sky has no limits, we witness that many of us have been recruited in top most companies by online job portals using LinkedIn etc., but that can have been done through authentic careers websites of the parent company. And why a job seeker needs to get drowned in various portals just to get linked up with the parent company/recruiter. Even this has become more vulnerable to the job seeker as sometimes he/she respond to various job consultants thinking they are applying to parent recruiter and they in other means grab their pockets.

Online job portals should be developed in more precise and executable manner and should provide support to job seekers in number of terms. Should inform job seeker about every next process so that he/she will not be in dark for long. Proper information should be provided to everyone apart from annoying the already stressed job seeker with advertisements and third party links of CV builders; this is mostly done to grab money. Portals are to meant to be platform of interaction, and it  should be only that.

J&K has sufficient talent, and consequently there is more search for jobs in other states of India and even in Gulf countries. Unfortunately job seekers now a days approach various companies for job openings despite the company having not advertised any vacancies. This is because of the rising unemployment ratio. If the online job portals will not respond and execute well, soon we will read the CVs published in print media as new mode to get reviewed. Job seekers should be treated as job seekers by portals not as money providers.

Khalid Mustafa is IT & Management Expert, presently Manager IT-Ops @HK Group