ShortTask: Connecting Online Job Seekers With Providers - like mturk

 

 

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ShortTask: Connecting Online Job Seekers With Providers

via WebWorkerDaily by Imran Ali on 4/26/09

Written by Imran Ali.

ShortTask is a marketplace for tasks, aiming to match-make "solvers" and "seekers": people who have time to complete brief tasks and people who need small tasks completed.

In many ways, ShortTask is similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service. Like MTurk, ShortTask is seeking to address tasks that aren't large enough to necessitate the hiring of a contractor or part-time employee. This marketplace is largely oriented around activities that can be completed from home — ideal for web workers — and currently numbers around 61,000 available tasks.

Activities include transcribing audio and video files, annotating images, copywriting, commenting on blog posts or online forums, data entry and online research. Seekers simply publish a task, set a payment level and deadline. Solvers can explore the site and select the tasks they'd like to complete. ShortTask takes a 10 percent commission on each transaction.

ShortTask might be a useful way to find additional work. However, I'm uncomfortable at the payment levels set in the marketplace. Salon published a great article in 2006 examining the labor law implications of Mechanical Turk, "I make $1.45 a week and I love it!," which suggested that MTurk-like services are undercutting the minimum wage.

For example, today ShortTask has listed a task to transcribe a 22-minute video, within four hours, for $5.50. That's about $1.30 an hour, or the equivalent of $200 for a month's work. That particular task is one of the better paying tasks listed at ShortTask; the worst fast-food service jobs will pay you better.

If services like ShortTask expect to flourish, they'll need seekers to pay fairly, so that a reasonably sized population of solvers can be sustained. More significantly, the marketplace operators should at least adhere to minimum wage levels.

People have fought for the right to be equitably compensated. Codifying that in the services we use to find work is both essential and moral.

What do you think of marketplaces like ShortTask?

 

 

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Raveal: The Future of Online Job Hunting?

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Raveal: The Future of Online Job Hunting?

Written by Darrell Etherington.

We've all probably used either Monster.com or Workopolis.com at some point. Whether or not we did so successfully or enjoyed the process is another story. Looking for work online can feel clumsy, impersonal and of questionable effectiveness. Even professional networking apps like LinkedIn haven't really made significant advances to the way we go about searching for jobs on the web. A new service, called Raveal, hopes to bring some fresh perspective to the online employment search game.

Raveal is aimed at the job hunter, promising to represent those who list themselves with the service as people, not assets. It's an attractive prospect when you're coming from a situation where you feel significantly less than human in the meat market that is Monster. And it has a distinctly simple, clean Web 2.0 look that at least shows the site's designers take their job seriously.

Once I got into the process of actually creating a profile, though, I began to wonder if the look and feel of the site were the only things that distinguished it from its predecessors. The information asked for when setting up your public profile is suspiciously similar to the information you'd be asked for on Workopolis or any similar site. I suppose the basic search criteria that employers will use doesn't vary that much, so maybe Raveal using it can be excused. Still, for a modern Web 2.0 app, I found the categories provided to be pretty traditional and restrictive.

Raveal's resume creator is a little more free-form. The standard "Objective," "Experience" and "Education" fields are all there (although you can customize even these basic section titles), but you can also add as many additional custom categories as you want. Each section has entries within it, which consist of a title and a description or details. It's a very simple format, but it does allow for considerable customization.

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