A SNS System for Sharing Informal and Experiential Information to Support Job-Hunting

Abstract

The main topic addressed in this paper is to support university students who start their job-hunting activities by sharing information of job-hunting and work experiences their old boys/girls in the same department had. However, it is not so easy for the students to obtain information concerning such experiences since there are few opportunities to make personal connections with their old boys/girls. In order to resolve this issue, we had developed a SNS (Social Networking Service) system, which helps students gather informal and experiential information. It includes two main services as follows: one is to gather information concerning job-hunting and work experiences from the old boys/girls by means of a theme blog service, and the other is to make personal connections between the students and old boys/girls by means of a search engine and a tracer that allow the students to find informative blog entries contributed by the old boys/girls. This paper demonstrates the SNS system, and reports a preliminary case study in a laboratory scale. The results of the case study suggest that the system enables the old boys/girls to write down their informal experiences with the theme blog, and that the system allows the students to have instructive information from the blog entries via the tracer.