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(July 03, 2003) - The hue and cry is becoming a din.

Although they are not necessarily the cause, the bad manners of employment websites are getting nearly constant media attention. The most recent entry is called "8GoodPeople" and is worth a couple of minutes of your attention. Here's the premise:

Employers:
We want to hear from you! 8GoodPeople.com was founded in part because of how difficult we found it to get your attention.

We know you're inundated with resumes and requests from people who just want a chance to tell you about their talents and skills. Well, consider this Web site our way to reach out to you.

Here's how it works:

Each of the 8 good people has written a creative bio, outlining their background, skills and job interests.

You can contact them directly using the email addresses posted on each of their bio pages. It will be up to each person to get back in touch with you and forward their resume, clips and any additional information you might require.

Since the Web is traversed by interesting and unusual people who might not take our approach to this job search effort as seriously as we do, we hope you'll understand if we ask that you include your name, company name, phone number and email address in your request so that we can verify who we're dealing with.

Thank you for your interest. We hope you'll take the time to seriously consider these 8 good people as serious job candidates.

The "8 Good People" are all journalists and writers of varying kinds who have endured long term unemployment and the vagaries of the job search. They've banded together to produce some "reality programming", snippets of the experiences they've encountered during extended job hunts.

You can 'hear' the desperation as they tell of websites with no responses, thousands of thoughtful email applications, confusing encounters with companies and the ins and outs of looking for work. See, in particular,

• Lonely On Craig's List
• Silence Isn't Golden
• Courtesy Is Dead
• My Greatest Weakness

Each story exposes the details of the hard work and humiliation that is a part of a sustained quest for employment.

The interesting thing, as we've been saying repeatedly, is that these experiences form the basis of an employment brand. Long after the downturn recedes from most memories, the sting of rudeness that should have been avoided will haunt the job hunters who experienced it.

On a separate note, we read recently of a study that used an ethnic caricature to look into the arena of badly performing websites. One of the consultants behind the stunt complained about getting no acknowledgement from "email a friend" functions on the employment sites. Just to be clear, 'email-a-friend' is not a referral program, it's a privacy feature. It's just that 'email-a-friend' is easier to use as a button label than 'this-email-will-not-be-logged-on-your-company's-system-so-you-can-send-it-to-yourself-on-your-aol-account-without-your-boss-knowing".

John Sumser

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