Online job tools too popular

Wilson and Horton announces...

The new online resume builder and psychometric assessment tools featured on the www.myjob.co.nz web site proved too popular on their first day.

So many users visited the site that the web server slowed to a crawl. Some users were on-line for over two hours before they had completed their assessments.

The new services, which are provided by Selector Group in partnership with Wilson and Horton, seem to have found their mark, according to Steve Pound, project manager at Selector Group.

He said the surge in users came right after Monday morning's article about the online eProfiler assessment tool in the Herald.

"We witnessed a 50-fold increase in traffic to our site that only grew as the day wore on," said Pound.

At 3:30 pm Selector Group managed to double the bandwidth of access to their servers but Webmaster Pete Asquith watched in awe as it was consumed. He said he felt like he was "standing under a waterfall with one cup." The doubling of bandwidth was like getting another cup.

Although the company's servers never went down, the wait between page loads proved too long for many users.

For those who gave up before completing their assessments, Mr Pound said e-Profiler was designed to withstand a connection break between it and a user. When users next log on, they will be able to resume the questionnaire from the point where they left off.

Selector Group expects to have a further quadrupling of bandwidth within three weeks, ensuring that page load times return to the target of eight to twelve seconds as opposed to Monday's typical three minutes.

The eProfiler services remain free of charge for the first week of operation, ending 9 am, Monday 8 May 2000.