Joel Cheesman continues to impress with a great podcast interview of Dan Finnegan, General Manager of Yahoo! HotJobs. As always, Joel has perfect timing!
Yesterday, while I was posting that job boards aren’t in the labor exchange business, Dan was telling Joel all about HotJobs’ new advertising programs. Listen to the podcast and count the times Dan uses the words: ‘advertising’, ‘advertiser’, ‘ads’, ‘classifieds’, ‘buying keywords’, etc. – the number is somewhere north of 20. Clearly HotJobs is primarily an advertising publisher.
Advertising isn’t a four-letter word of course; but advertising isn’t the ‘outcome’ that labor exchange participants are seeking. Ads are simply a tool in the process of finding the perfect employee or the perfect job.
Searching, matching, screening, and qualifying – Dan didn’t use these words as often, but he did reference having the best algorithm for sifting through content. And one of Dan’s statement really stood out: “We’ve learned something really important … consumers gravitate to the content that they see as the highest quality and most relevant.”
Sometimes what we know, say, and do are different – Dan says that relevance is important, yet the following posts suggest HotJobs is near the bottom of the pack when it comes to delivering relevant results.
HotJobs Rated Unacceptable for Semi-Active Job Search
8th Best Site for Active Job Search – HotJobs
Is the disconnect between the ‘spin’ and ‘reality’ intentional? It’s hard to believe that with all of the resources of Yahoo at their disposal, HotJobs is unable to deliver more relevant results.
Robert:
You raise some intersting points. I wanted to trackback for a recent post of mine that references the same podcast. My post can be found at http://recruitomatic.wordpress.com/2006/06/29/all-that-glitters/and I would really welcome your comment.
Amitai.
Posted by: Recruitomatic | June 29, 2006 at 07:21 PM