I decided tonight to augment my job search by putting these two popular web sites to work. I discovered a few things:

RE Workopolis: They are proud that they've just introduced RSS. What year is it again? What's worse, they can't create custom feeds based on your search (even the HRDC web site does that!), and there are no general supercategory feeds, so if I wanted to make use of this exciting new feature, I would have to subscribe to about 95 feeds individually and then sift through records from each that were mostly for other cities, looking for the odd one that was actually relevant to me. In the time it would take me to do this, I could pay my way through University dredging grocery store dumpsters for returnable glass bottles.

They have a "boss panic button" that I'm hoping is a joke but I fear is intended for actual use (a curio is that Firefox doesn't even try to stop it). It provides an outdated shot of a Windows 2000/ME desktop, which conspicuously includes an icon for Netscape Communicator, and a document being edited in what might be MS Word 95. Again, what year is it? As if the whole thing wasn't enough of a farce, they had to put an accurate title tag in the HTML file, so it comes with a big bright title bar across the top that says "Workopolis.com - Boss Panic Button". Well gee, now your boss will NEVER know you were looking for another job! That's absolutely BRILLIANT!

Whenever I clicked on a link for information or to an external web site, I lost my place, in searching/registration/etc., because it opened in the main tab/window. Very sloppy. After this happened the second time I just gave up and went to Monster.ca.

And when the hell did it become acceptable to advertise every conceivable detail of a job *except* the salary range? This sort of rude behaviour on the part of employers insults my intelligence and wastes my time, and it seems that sites like this are perpetuating the phenomenon. I guess this information is considered extraneous in the professional leagues.

RE Monster: "Target job title" is a required field in the registration process. This information is both provided to prospective employers and used to filter jobs that are supposedly relevant to you. This is probably the dumbest idea a human being has come up with since Plato.

Tied for second are the suggestion that I "build" yet another online resume to do a half-assed job of replacing the real one I already took the time to make, and the requirement that if I want to simply upload my real resume, it must be in MS Word format. For a third time... the year, please?

Finally, if I'm going to upload my resume anyway, why the hell do I need to spend several minutes entering a whole bunch of redundant information, especially if I can click a radio button so that NO ONE WILL EVER SEE IT??

Kijiji, Craigslist and the HRDC Job Bank all allow me to search efficiently through RSS feeds for jobs in my geographical area and desired industry, without silly "free membership" limitations, redundant resumes, cluttering my email with daily alerts or even the need to create an account and provide my vital details to one more faceless organization that swears it won't allow them to be compromised. The process is speedy, and I get what I need, all in one place, without a great deal of extraneous effort. Apparently this was too difficult for the specialty sites to figure out.

I guess it just goes to show that, no matter how convenient web technology becomes, there will always be a way for idiots to make it maddeningly inefficient. If Monster and Workopolis used their own services to hire their development teams, maybe that tells me all I need to know.