Quick Review: Zumeo.com
I found out about Zumeo.com through a post on TechCrunch. Zumeo bills itself as a social networking and employment tool for Gen Y (vaguely along the lines of LinkedIn). It immediately grabbed my attention as a service with tremendous (though currently unrealized) potential. I’m not really looking for a job at the moment, but I decided to sign up and try Zumeo out.
The Concept
Despite the proliferation of employment-related websites and networking tools, making good matches between employers and potential employees remains a challenge. The problem is information overload: Employers are drowning in applications and find it difficult to identify the best candidates at a glance, while job seekers face an overwhelming sea of mostly irrelevant job listings. It’s difficult to sift through the noise to find what you’re looking for.
Zumeo wants to profile candidates and match them with relevant positions. Properly done, this could boost the signal-to-noise ratio in an applicant pool, giving employers a better range of choices, while making it easier for job seekers to find the positions that interest them. It also matches you with other users who are supposed to be useful candidates for networking.
The Function
Does it work? Not quite yet – at least, not for me. When you set up a Zumeo profile, the site asks you to complete a survey designed to identify your strengths and personality so it can match you with job listings. It’s a great idea, and the process is as quick and simple as possible, but once the profiling was complete and I was matched with supposedly relevant jobs, I didn’t see a single listing that I would’ve applied for had I actually been looking.
This is probably partly a function of the size and contents of the Zumeo job database combined with my relatively specialized career requirements and the smaller job market in which I live. Still, I’m a college graduate with two years of white-collar work experience currently living on the east coast; I’m not moving to Santa Monica to work in a retail stockroom for Adidas, or to Seattle to work as a delivery driver for Pepsi (two of the top three results I received). For Zumeo to differentiate itself from its many competitors, the service needs to find a way to sift out this chaff and present me with worthwhile options. Relevance should be the goal, and I saw nothing even slightly relevant to my skills, interests, or location.
The Form
Currently, Zumeo’s greatest strength is its design. The site is gorgeous, and dead simple to navigate. At no point did I struggle to find what I was looking for. Information is presented logically and coherently, and it’s easy to edit the fields on your resume. There’s very little extraneous stuff on any page. This is a key part of Zumeo’s potential. The people behind the site understand two crucial things: the importance of aesthetic appeal to their target market and the value of a tool that’s easy to use and hard to screw up.
One visual issue: It’s a little jarring to see Google adspace in the footer of what purports to be a professional-grade web app. I understand the reasoning: money is tight at any startup, and especially in today’s market, but this looks cheap and amateurish. I can’t imagine it’s generating enough revenue to make such a sacrifice worthwhile. That said, I’m certainly not going to stop using the site because of it.
The Promise
Zumeo is so promising because the people behind the site are trying to accomplish the right thing: build a tool that will intelligently match employers with job seekers to ease the process for both. Executed properly, it won’t be simply a me-too social network, and they appear to have some good ideas about how to do this. It’s particularly compelling for the user base Zumeo targets to profile strengths, since ability (not experience) is the primary calling card of the entry-level Gen Y job seeker. The implementation isn’t there yet, but I expect Zumeo to improve with time and ultimately prosper. The key will be improving the algorithm’s matching ability and building the job database.
My resume on Zumeo
[Update 2/11/10: I deleted my Zumeo account today. I continue to think it's a great site (indeed, it's gotten much better since I wrote this review), but as a law student and lawyer-to-be, I have idiosyncratic professional needs that Zumeo simply isn't built to meet. In the interest of consolidating and streamlining my online presence, I decided to delete my account.]
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