Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a website for people looking for jobs in Korea, KoreaJobFinder.com. This is, hopefully, my retirement plan.

As a background, Korea’s somewhat of an oddball when it comes to online communities. Websites that have a huge following in the west, for whatever reason have a hard time tapping into the Korean market. The job market is similar — companies like craigslist, monster, and careerbuilder have little or no presence in Korea.

There are a few existing job websites in Korea that cater to foreigners (non-Korean residents). The biggest of these is a site called Dave’s ESL Cafe, which is specifically for English teaching jobs (which make up probably 99% of the foreign job market in Korea). There are probably a half dozen other job boards as well, but this is definitely the most popular.

So my idea isn’t anything novel. But the reason I made KoreaJobFinder is because I feel the other job boards are just plain cumbersome to use. Click on the Dave’s link to see what I mean. It assaults your eyes with caps lock and an overflow of information. If you’re looking for a job, your only choice is to read every single headline, and click on the ones that interest you. Then you have to skim read the entire post to find crucial details, like how much the job pays (which usually determines whether or not you’re even interested in reading more about the position), resulting in a lot of wasted time and effort.

With my site, I’m working from the ground up to make the job search as efficient as possible for the user. Users can search by a set of criteria, so that every job post they read is for a job they would potentially take. I’m also making an effort to organize key information at the top of each post, so users can take in the crucial information quickly, then decide whether or not they want to read more about the position.

I’m banking on the assumption that if I put the time and effort into making a genuinely useful website, people will share the link and it will start to gain popularity (and start showing up in relevant Google searches). From there, I can start charging for recruiters to post job listings, which is how the site will eventually make money.

So, check out the website and let me know what you think: http://koreajobfinder.com. It’s a long way off, but as long as I continue to put in a bit of work every day, I’ll eventually get there. Any feedback on the website is welcome, and if anyone wants to spread the word on their blog, facebook, or twitter, it would be much appreciated!