Neither fish nor foul, Yahoo! HotJobs combines the business model of a traditional job board (paid placement) with the inclusion of spidered (non-paid) job classifieds, typical of vertical search sites. This unusual combination of business concepts could be great for job seekers; but so far, the execution by HotJobs doesn’t deliver on the potential.
Back in July 2005, when HotJobs announced the inclusion of spidered jobs, Dan Finnigan (Yahoo! senior vice president and Yahoo! HotJobs general manager) stated: "Job seekers now have one place to find quality jobs from across the Web".
At the time of the HotJobs announcement, Charlene Li, made some great points: “On the surface, this seems silly – why would they want to cannibalize the service’s main source of revenues, paid jobs?” Charlene then answered her question by saying, “So Yahoo! really doesn’t have much to lose in terms of revenues – and they also have a great deal to gain as they are third place player to Monster and CareerBuilder. Also, I think Yahoo! sees the writing on the wall with meta-job search engines like Indeed.com, Simply Hired, and WorkZoo that were scraping all of the major job search engines.”
Now, six months later, HotJobs still looks mostly like a traditional job board. Yes, they are adding some spidered jobs; but the reality is that searching HotJobs today for all jobs updated within the past 7 days finds a total of 194,297 jobs. Of these jobs, 161,621 are paid placement ads, and the remaining 32,676 are spidered (non-paid) classifieds. Contrast these numbers with the 1,057,687 jobs found by Indeed during the past seven days. With only one-fifth the total jobs found by Indeed, and with only 17% of their total listings from spidered sources, it appears HotJobs still has work ahead of them if they are to meet their goal of delivering “… one place to find quality jobs from across the Web.”
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