Jobs Open

Jobs-Open strives to provide an easily browsable list of jobs that are available in Canada.

Currently the sole source of jobs is from the HRSDC site and typically every weekday hour jobs are added. This site adds maps, links to websites, and emails with inteligent subject lines.

See the HRSDC page for problem reports.

Jobs-Open.com went live in November of 2006. I was unemployed at the time and part of the motive was to provide me with better access to job listings, email handling, links to web sites, and maps. At that time the HRDC didn't provide such sophistication.

Nothing much happened for a couple of years, just some modifications to handle changes in the HRSDC website, but that was all, apart from the fact that I retired. The advertizing on the site payed for the hosting costs and upgrades to my computer equipment, but nothing else. For my part, I was doing little except checking that things were still working.

However, in late 2008 the Canadian economy started its melt down and traffic to the site quickly doubled. I also started getting a slew of complaints from employers, job seekers, and HRDC about jobs listed on the site which had been filled. This necessitated a complete overhaul of the software involved. While the immediate problems have been solved, the increased traffic flow has galvanized me into working on ways to improve the usefulness of the site.

Saskatchewan jobs which have been missing since before Christmas should be back soon. Saskatchewan handles its own jobs and I don’t add much value to their listings. Nevertheless, they should be included for completeness. ( I have been saying this for a couple of month now. The delay is tied to a revision of site navigation that I am working on. Saskatchewan also has more centers now than it used to have. ) Quebec jobs have never been part of the site, because I don’t speak the language. Despite this problem, I have recently been looking at the possibility of including them as well.

2009 May: Added a location and category subheading to every job on every page which has a list of jobs. For humans this is often redundant as the main page title usually provides sufficient information. Search engines, unfortunately, need more prodding. If you repeat Construction, Ottawa, Ontario a dozen times one a page it is more likely to send some one searching for Construction jobs open in Ottawa to that page.

A bounce is a visitor coming to the site and only looking at one page then going to another site. The bounce rate for jobs-open is 40%, all similar sized jobsites 44% and all sites who use Google analytics 46%. By encouraging search engines to send visitors to more relevant pages this should reduce the frustration of wasted searches and lower the bounce rate for this site.