Whether you’re working your network via email or scanning online classifieds every morning over coffee, chances are the Internet plays some role in your job search these days.

But most websites, including Monster, Craigslist and members-only postings for trade associations, are still based on the classic bulletin-board model. Looking for a job on these sites consists primarily of tapping in keywords and weeding through whatever listings pop up.

One upstart, RealMatch, takes a different tack. Billing itself as the “eHarmony of the employment industry”, RealMatch borrows techniques from dating sites to more efficiently match employers and workers using standard descriptions of skills, employment history and job preferences.

The service is free for jobseekers. Assuming you already have the basic information about your job and education history handy, building a profile takes just a few minutes. RealMatch’s system is a great deal less cumbersome than many competing sites.

Choosing a particular job title pulls up an associated group of skills common in that field, and you specify your level of talent in each. Further prompts ask you for details about your job history, education, relevant hobbies and so forth.

Meanwhile, employers create profiles for the jobs they want to fill, using the same menus for associated skills and experience levels.

That common language of titles and skills eliminates the guesswork inherent in keyword searches. You won’t miss out on great jobs because you (or the hiring manager writing the ad) made a typo, and civil engineers won’t waste time reading ads for “maintenance engineers”.

Once your profile is saved, RealMatch’s software looks for overlap with current advertisements and presents the results to both the jobseeker and the employer ranked by the quality of the match: “great”, “good” or “basic”. The more information you add about yourself, the more likely you are to get an appropriate match, the company promises.

Jobseekers can then either initiate a conversation with matching employers or wait to hear from them. I suggest the more active approach. Here, as on other job sites, the odds still favour the employers.

The site does have a few drawbacks, namely in the number and variety of jobs available. RealMatch launched as a standalone online job-search site in May, but a sister programme already runs more than 1,000 newspapers’ job market sites, giving RealMatch a jump-start on attracting listings.

I expect the number of jobs to grow on this site, as well as on other free sites — and I mean free to the employer, not the job hunter — given the minimal upfront investment needed. With RealMatch, employers pay only when they find a specific candidate in whom they are interested, a strong enticement to post their jobs there instead of relying only on what company executives dub the “pay, post and pray” approach of most job sites.

And that’s a sentiment that should appeal to jobseekers as well.