ITwiw.com A Job Board Without the Job
Most job boards like Monster.com and the like focus on being huge resume databases. Their goal is to gather potential workforce information (resumes) and then convince someone to pay for it (or something related to it).
ITwiw.com focuses on being a “people board” rather than a job board. In other words, it focuses on letting people put up their information so that prospective employers can search for and find them. Sound familiar? Yep, this is very similar to Linkedln.
The difference, ITwiw says, is in the way information is presented and stored.
Firstly, the person looking for a job and posting a virtual resume is completely in charge of how that information is displayed and what information, exactly, is to be displayed. So your info isn’t just “out there” waiting for the next goofball or psycho to find it.
Secondly, the site focuses on people rather than on jobs or skills and focuses totally on the IT industry.
It’s not quite a job board and not quite social networking. It’s kind of a new thing. If you’re looking for a “regular” job in the IT industry and aren’t interested in the huge, corporate Monster, this might be for you.
I doubt that many freelancers will find the site all that useful, though it could be used to find others for one-off jobs or to build networking relationships for further collaboration.
Overall, it’s a good idea and I agree with the site’s founders that the day of the “job board” is about to end. More and more, employers are finding them to be prohibitive in both cost and usability. Just because you get 1,200 resumes of potential prospects doesn’t mean you’re getting 1,200 resumes of QUALIFIED prospects.
So the real question for ITwiw is whether the online resume itself is becoming outdated or not. I think there will always be a place for it, but it’s not going to be as prominent in the job search as it used to be. We’re in the early age of the social media and networking (aka “Web 2.0”) era and I think that this will be the direction that employment hunting will go as well.
Regardless, ITwiw is in its early stages and completely free to use. It will be interesting to follow how it develops. I predict that this is one of the first in a long line to come of “job board replacement” sites.
