14 Mar NCWorks Online goes offline to bring you enhancements
Sometimes distance really does make the heart grow fonder.
The state of North Carolina hopes that an upcoming weekend shut-down of its nearly year-old NCWorks Online system and resulting re-boot with enhancements will gladden the hearts of job-seekers and employers alike.
NCWorks Online will go offline on Friday, March 21, at 5 p.m. and remain inaccessible until Monday, March 24, at 8 a.m. During this time, upgrades to the system for both job-seekers and employers will be installed. We appreciate your patience during this weekend and hope you’ll find the new features, outlined below, make your experience with NCWorks Online more robust.
Enhancements for job-seekers
Skills assessments
You’ll be able to take multiple skills and other assessments, including work values and an interest analyzer, to help you find potential occupations and jobs; use your individual or combined scores to search for your perfect position. If you’re in a mid-career change or a recent college graduate, you might find these tools particularly helpful.
Typical tools and technologies
Based on the occupation you select as a “desired occupation” associated with your resume, you’ll be presented with a list of technologies (software) and tools (actual on-the-job implements) to indicate your proficiency. In addition to providing another layer of search for employers to find you, you can use this feature to explore NCWorks Online for jobs where employers are searching for candidates who can use these tools and technologies.
Both of these features (skills assessment results and typical tools and technologies) will be displayed in your resume. Using the job search directly from your resume, you can search by your skills; and in the advanced job search tab, you can use the assessments combined with other search criteria to find your perfect job.
Resumes
You will be able to send a resume to an employer as either an attachment to or in the body of an email.
Job-search features
New to the employer search’s desired location criteria is “search by zip code.” Plug in yours and search up to 50 miles.
In advanced job search, there will be new filters and options in the “preferred employer criteria” drop-down menus and an enhanced keyword search.
There will be several improvements to the quick job search: you can select multiple sources instead of just one; and the other job sites feature, which currently is a tab, is now a hyperlink at the bottom of the page that connects you to 29 other job-search sites.
Job orders
When you perform a job search and positions show, a “workplace skills match” section will appear in the job details if you’ve taken the WorkKeys assessment.
In each section of the job order, colored pie wedges or thumbs up/thumbs down icons will appear based on the assessments you’ve taken; this feature provides a quick visual determination of your qualifications and likelihood of being a good match for that employer. If you choose not to take the assessments, the icons will be gray.
New to the share this job section is the ability to share a job order on LinkedIn.
Enhancements for employers
Employer dashboard
Just as the typical tools and technologies are a good enhancement for job-seekers, so you can make them work for you. In an eponymous tab in the human resources plan section of your dashboard, you can create as many tools and technologies as you need to find the perfect candidate.
When you’re in the advanced resume search, you can click on candidate typical tools and technologies to indicate how close a match you want to get.
Job orders
The summary view has a new option to “pre-fill advanced resume search” in the ranking criteria section that, as its name suggests, pre-fills information from the job order; you can use the pre-filled occupation, occupational experience and salary sections to search for top candidates.
In the other skills section, clicking on “Edit Other Skills” will take you to a screen to answer the question, “Does this position require or prefer applications to have a specific WorkKeys score?” You can indicate your desired score for two of the three options (yes, required and yes, preferred, with the third option being no) and NCWorks Online will automatically determine the corresponding Career Readiness Certification (CRC) level. The advanced resume search feature will then allow you to search candidates by WorkKeys scores or CRC levels.
The application question set was developed to help employers gain a more detailed look at all the candidates who apply for a job and determine their suitability for a position. New to this feature is that responses to the questions are already entered for candidates, totally automating the process and providing easy viewing for you.
When you’re reviewing applicants, you can click on questionnaire response in the detailed view to learn the overall correct answers by both number and percentage; you can sort candidates by the best overall response. You can also see which specific answers were both right and wrong.
Advanced resume search
The keyword search has been greatly enhanced.
In resume search by skills, you can now add resume modification date (ranging from “anytime” through “last 90 days”) as a filter.
Login to NCWorks Online first thing Monday morning, March 24, to check out these site improvements!