MySpace Careers Launches

Via TechCrunch:

Myspace launched their career site yesterday. It’s “powered by SimplyHired” and is targeted towards the college/entry-level crowd. For example, here’s the front-page index (please ignore the crap resolution, done with MS Paint, and Flickr hosting):

This is a very smart slicing strategy for both MySpace and SimplyHired. The latter prides itself on listing all sorts of jobs, not just the Monster.com/LinkedIn exec/tech job focus:

If your cousin is looking for a part-time job working the evening shift at a pickle factory 300 miles west of Texas, we’ll help you locate that one-in-a-million job waiting for her in Albuquerque. Our tools will turn everyone into an expert at finding the needle in their own personal haystack.

I can definitely see my students using this to find work. And the listings seem very comprehensive- they list 1001 lifeguard jobs, everywhere from Hawaii to Alaska!

It remains to be seen, though, whether MySpace will do a decent job of promoting this site. It’s not listed in their (usually ignored) text index on each page– did you know they have an enormous games site, for example? No, probably not, because it’s not promoted anywhere else on the site, and you can’t embed the games in your profile. There’s a text block on the main MySpace.com page that includes their other initiatives like Comedy (promoted by Sierra Mist), Books, and Movies– all of which have varying degrees of balance between functionality, content, and marketing glurge– but in my experience, these are really niche mini-sites within MySpace.

I guess MySpace is goaling themselves on being a comprehensive lifestyle portal, but as usual their crappola information architecture takes away from the utility of all these mini-sites. The site’s general philosophy seems to be to roll things out very slowly and then kind of wait until people find them, which makes sense when you have a supposed user base of 40-70 million.

Technorati Tags: myspace careers, web2.0