Wikis for Job Boards
Almost everyone who spends a significant amount of time on-line has heard of Wikipedia, the on-line encylopedia which is created and maintained not by some faceless group of writers, researchers, and editors at a publishing house but instead by a faceless group of writers working in their bunny slippers at two in the morning. Wikipedia, like many wikis, is collaborative, user generated content. If I post an article with which you disagree or wish to enhance, you can edit my words. An editor is generally assigned to make sure that those edits are appropriate. The result is a document or series of documents that are reviewed, corrected, and enhanced by thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users.
So what does this have to do with job boards? Everything. Job boards range from having virtually no content generated by users to having a huge amount of content generated by users. For those of us in the latter group, I think that most would agree that we're not afraid of user generated content. To the contrary, we embrace it and see it as a way of both enhancing the information on our sites and the sense of community surrounding our sites. A great way for job boards users to contribute content and to be part of the community surrounding the job board is to contribute articles to a wiki or edit articles which have already been posted. That's why we recently added a job hunting wiki section to CollegeRecruiter.com with articles on almost five dozen of the biggest employers of college students searching for internships and recent graduates looking for entry level jobs and other careers. A nice side benefit: early indications are that the search engines like the content so the wiki section is also helping to increase our traffic numbers in a low cost, sustainable fashion.
Is your organization listed? If not and your organization hires a lot of college students and recent graduates, send us an article similar to one of those already running and we'll be happy to add it. Or, better yet, create a free wiki account and add the article yourself. That will increase your interaction with CollegeRecruiter.com and build your feeling of community with others using our site.
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