Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Jobs in Pittsburgh

At a meeting earlier this week I heard that the Pittsburgh Tech Council is in the process of a website revamp. Great news! After meeting a Pgh newcomer on an airplane earlier this month (he's taken a job with Westinghouse and moving his family here from Connecticut), I went to the Tech Council site to see what kinds of jobs are listed. Answer: I don't know. To search, I have to create an account. That should be optional. [Updated 11/28: As Jim points out in the Comments, anyone can search, even without registering. My bad. Still, the fact that I made this mistake makes me wonder whether I'm alone, and whether improved site design would improve access to the resource.] If I were a student, I could search for internships without registering. That's good. When I look at the list of internships, I can click links to see the full-time jobs being offered by companies offering internships. So there's a back door into the full-time job listings, at least for some companies. But the current site is a muddle, and it projects the wrong impression -- that breaking into the Pittsburgh job market is tough.

That impression needs to change. Pittsburgh employers and regional service organizations need to make it easy to find jobs and apply for them. In fact, and contrary to the popular image of Pittsburgh as a dying city, there are new jobs in Pittsburgh -- lots of new jobs. Good jobs. Westinghouse is hiring. Allegheny Technologies/Allegheny Ludlum is hiring. Kennametal is hiring. (Yes, I know that the company is located in Latrobe.) US Steel is hiring. And those are only the companies that I know about from face-to-face conversations. If your company is looking to hire, feel free to add a link in the Comments.

But Pittsblog comments are no way to run a region. There must be a better way to get this word out. There's work to do in Pittsburgh. (Feel free to adopt this as a slogan, if you like it.)

The Tech Council can only be part of a solution. Flipdog, now part of monster.com, has a Pittsburgh jobs board. And I only spent 15 minutes this morning looking around the web. Thoughts?

11 comments:

Jefferson Provost said...

Does the Tech Council's jobs site add any value over existing national job search sites? Monster, flipdog, and careerbuilder already allow geographically targeted searches. The Tech Council's site seems like a needless duplication of effort.

Anonymous said...

Vivisimo (vivisimo.com) is hiring like crazy.

Jim Russell said...

Anyone can search the employment database at PTC's website. I don't have an account there but I can view the jobs available.

Unknown said...

As someone who was actively looking to change jobs but stay in town from 04 to 06, and who did it twice - the PTC site seems to be about 60% for local staffing firms to fill contract jobs for the "big" companies, with some small fraction on top of that for them to place direct hires. The good thing is you can usually figure out the hiring company by the composite info in the posts. With the 'burgh being so cozy, you can then ring up your contact at said company and get your resume in through employee referral. If I were looking to leave town, I'd use Indeed and Simplyhired, which aggregate postings from all the other job sites.

Anonymous said...

Breaking into the Pittsburgh TECH job market - which the Tech Council serves - is tough even for people living in the Pittsburgh area. Most tech companies are small, and many or most of their available jobs are filled via personal networks. People in banking, manufacturing, healthcare, etc. who would like to make a move into the fast paced, opportunistic world of tech companies have a very, very difficult time doing so. It's unfortunate, because the tech companies could benefit from their knowledge of the markets that the tech companies are selling to.

I have first hand experience with this too. I lived here my entire life and it took me 16 years to break into the tech community here - and I was trying every year. Responding to the sparse job ads on PTC or Monster or elsewhere is a poor way to do so I learned. And, when you are outside of the tech community, your personal networks don't often reach into tech companies... Many others have had the same experience...

Anonymous said...

Here's the current list of Pittsburgh openings at Alcoa:

https://sjobs.brassring.com/EN/ASP/TG/cim_advsearch.asp?

We're always hiring.

Jefferson Provost said...

Hmmm... The brassring.com site (used by both Alcoa and Allegheny Industries) incorrectly states that my cookies are disabled, and won't even let me view the site.

I'm using Firefox on a Mac. I don't have cookies disabled, but I do have the browser set to ask me on a case-by-case basis whether I want to keep or block cookies from sites I visit. I'm not blocking cookies from brassring.com or sjobs.brassring.com or www.brassring.com. My browser never even had an opportunity to ask if I wanted to receive cookies from them.

It's possible that the brassring site expects me to accept cookies from some unnamed third-party site that I'm already blocking, but how am I to know which one?

Good thing I'm not actually looking for a job. It looks like brassring and their client sites aren't interested in hiring web-savvy, privacy conscious candidates. Maybe brassring needs to recruit itself a decent web developer. I don't have this problem with any of the other job sites I've visited since this post went up.

Jim Russell said...

Mr. Fisher failed to provide the full url. Try www.alcoacareers.com

Jefferson Provost said...

Actually, Brad's URL works fine... once I've visited www.alcoacareers.com. Apparently that's the site that I needed to get the cookie from?

That's still crappy web design. People expect to be able to copy URLs into web links and have them work okay for other people. Case in point: the Westinghouse jobs link in Mike's original post is similarly broken. (Not Allegheny Technologies as I said above. They don't seem to use brassring, and their link works fine.)

PaniniGuy said...

Does the PTC's job site add value?

Absofrickinglutely.

Monster's search functions/filters are pretty poor, and Career Builder is worse. Lots of spam/crap job postings on both unless you're using very specific insider (to the point of arcane) keywords.

With PTC, the jobs are real.

Jefferson Provost said...

But shouldn't Pittsburgh tech companies be advertising nationally for talent? What are the odds that a hotshot coder (or engineer, chemist, whatever) from outside Pgh will ever even look at the Tech Council's job site?

That means that they have to advertise on the other boards too.