Employment Agency Websites That Suck

Friday, 12 June 1998

You'd think it would be easy for a clueful person like myself, with practical experience managing a large website, to find web-related work in New York. That's what I thought. I figured I'd just sign on with a temp agency and let them handle it, right? This is, after all, the '90s, the age of the temp worker, and there's no shortage of temp agencies in this town.

The first thing that amazed me was that the websites of the agencies that claim to specialize in web-based temp jobs are uniformly awful. Some of the mistakes are just stupid errors, such as the A.C. Lion site, whose page title is "Document Title." Every site that I've seen so far uses frames -- usually unnecessarily. SiliconAlleyJobs.Com is an especially egregious offender in this regard: four frames, only one of which actually offers any information that the reader is interested in. The others aren't even there for navigation, they just have logos and ads (including a really distracting animated GIF).

Most of them don't offer any <NOFRAMES> text. If I want to use them, I have to turn frames back on in my browser. Silicon Alley Connection is even worse, requiring (for no reason that I can discern) JavaScript to be enabled in order to use their site, despite the fact that clueful netheads know that JavaScript is a security risk and browse with it turned off. There's no message warning the user that JavaScript is necessary, either, and the script produces different results in Internet Explorer than it does in Netscape Navigator, at least on the Mac.

All of these sites suffer from Multimedia Inadequacy Syndrome -- the designers want to design sexy CD-ROM products with flashing animation and huge graphics and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back, so they design web pages with cumbersome clunky giant graphics and image maps that take forever to download and clutter up my screen when what I want to be looking at is job listings. I don't think any of the designers could survive the Breath Test (Can you hold your breath for as long as it takes your web page to download and fully display over a 28.8 kbd modem?).

Web-Staff is a division of MacTemps, a company that's been around for a while. (Well, at leat eight years, which is a pretty good stretch in the computer industry.) Their website is perhaps the least offensive of those I've seen, and actually has some good design features. A couple of weeks ago, I filled out the forms on their website, sent in my résumé, and waited. And waited. After a week, I phoned their office to find out if they'd received the information. I was told that they had, and that I'd hear from them within a week. That was last Thursday, eight days ago. Sigh.

Not only that, but the four NY-area jobs listed on their site (really only two, since one is listed as "filled" and another is an administrative position at Web-Staff) have been up there since I first looked at the site. Not encouraging. It's a shame, because I'd especially wanted to deal with Web Staff. For one thing, as a division of MacTemps, I figured they'd be more likely to be able to get me Mac work. For another, they're the only folks so far who haven't asked me to submit my résumé in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. I don't see why I should need to buy a new word processor (especially one that's widely considered a downgrade from the one I'm already using) to get a job that won't involve using a word processor. Web-Staff, sensibly, asks its applicants to submit résumés in ASCII, via their web form.