Job Search EngineHow LinkUp Works
April 2009
Analogy #1 - The Detective of Company Websites
If you think of websites like people, then LinkUp is a lot like a detective. Jobseekers with a case, looking for a specific person (or stepping outside the analogy, a job). We then use our time, resources and skills tracking down these jobs on company websites and bringing back the results. Jobseekers have better things to do than looking over 20,000 employer websites for what interests them, better leave it to the pros (that's us). So using the skills of LinkUp as your job search detective, we're able to provide you the best jobs on the internet because that's what we specialize in. And there's no charge (yes, the analogy stops here).
Analogy #2 - A Specialized Google
Google scours the internet looking for all content on every webpage for every topic. LinkUp scours all company websites, specifically ignoring recruiter websites and job boards, looking just for jobs. So why aren't other companies doing what LinkUp does if it is as simple as a search engine? Because there's a lot going on behind the curtain! So while Google just grabs everything, LinkUp needs to seperate job title from description from location — which is a lot of work but we're dedicated to doing because we want to bring jobseekers the best job search engine on the internet!
A Diagram Worth Ten Thousand Words
Technically Speaking
LinkUp employs a collection of proprietary techniques to index employer websites, using our custom search engine technology to offer jobseekers a uniform experience.
Over the course of five years, we've tuned our categorization methods to help sort company jobs into consistent buckets (since not all companies use the same terminology for their departments). To provide better services to jobseekers, we've taken the Occupational Information Network's listing of over 1,000 categories and simplified it down to 127 common categories — making it fast to find relevant jobs without being overburdened by corporate lingo.
The largest benefit of LinkUp is that some employers' career sections are buried deep in their site, some have hundreds of openings without search capability, and some require you to register first. LinkUp does all this work for you, so you can spend more time looking at jobs than trying to find them.
There are tons of other complicated pieces, from the complicated process of unifying job locations (like Manhattan vs NYC), to being polite to company servers while keeping all listings current. If you'd like to learn more about these methods, contact us. Or better yet, just search for jobs and enjoy that fact that it just works!