Yahoo! HotJobs lets loose
There’s a lot of speculation on internet today surrounding the Yahoo! HotJobs launch of a web search engine for jobs. It is all well-meaning, but mostly misses the mark. This is not the death of job search engines, but is the death of HotJobs’ business if taken to its logical conclusion.
Joel Cheesman’s view is that “the job board model doesn’t work.”
But that’s not quite so, even for the folks at Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Yahoo! HotJobs that rely on the employer paying them advertising dollars to attract candidate attention.
Internet search engines are great for helping people find things. What they’re not great at doing is helping people find people. Or, the right people anyway. Because unlike things, people have varying interests. So one person’s desire to talk to you may be in no way equal to your desire to talk to them.
So when Joel mentions in his comments:
“Today, clutter litters the landscape.”
He’s exactly right on that. And clutter has ruled the landscape since the first Super Bowl ads brought our industry into the public’s imagination. That classic Monster pitch “When I Grow Up” brought a lot of attention to online job postings.
But when he continues:
”I think a central place for job content (heck, all information) is what the public wants. The success of Google lies in great part to its ability to be a central clearing house for data.”
He misses the mark. As I wrote in this week’s newsletter, a job listing is not a job listing is not a job listing on the internet:
http://goodadvice.sales.theladders.com/archives/newsletter/index.html#listing
” A job listing is only as good as the attention paid to it.”
And when you have one central place for job content, everybody and his brother drops by and leaves their resume, their application, their information or profile, making it very difficult for real recruiters to get their work done.
So yes, the HotJobs move seems like a strange one (why would you pay when they’ll list you for free?) but is hardly the harbinger of death for the employer-pays industry.
