Chad Sowash, VP of Business Development at DirectEmployers, asks a great question:
“Why are original jobs and duplicate jobs, found on job search engines, treated in the same manner when it comes to relevancy?”
Does the source really matter when considering relevance? After all, wouldn’t we normally consider duplicate products from two different sources to be equivalent? If not, then I’d posit that the perceived difference (aside from price) isn’t in the product itself, but rather in the additional services and brand image of the suppliers. Bottom line, we trust some sources more than others.
So I think Chad is proposing that ‘trust’ be a part of the relevance calculation when he suggests that “Jobs originating and residing on corporate career sites should be weighted with more relevance than duplicate postings pulled from one or many other sources.”
Makes sense to me in most cases … and of course it makes sense to Google … their PageRank system gives additional weight to trusted sources when calculating relevance. But Chad, there are a few problems:
First, not every ‘employer’ can be trusted. Some ‘employers’ have scam sites phishing for personal information, while others are advertising ‘business opportunities’ that require upfront investment on the part of the jobseeker. Sites like CareerBuilder, Monster and Dice work to weed out ads from these bogus ‘employers’ … so I think it’s fair to say that the big boards have a higher trust rating in these cases. DirectEmployers and JobCentral don’t have to deal with this problem because the initial membership fee encourages bogus ‘employers’ to go elsewhere.
Second, relevance, or at least position in the result set, is for sale on most job boards. Let’s assume for a minute that an employer places identical information on their corporate career site, CareerBuilder, Monster and Dice, and then a vertical job search site spiders the ad from all four locations. I’d consider all four sites trusted sources; and while it may be true that the corporate site has the highest trust rating, what if CareerBuilder was willing to pay the vertical job site to list their ad first, with the other three sources listed behind a link called ‘other sources’? Are the results less relevant to the jobseeker? That would hard to argue, and even if true the vertical sites are not betraying any party in doing so and they have every right to generate revenue from facilitating the connection between advertiser and jobseeker.
Third, does ‘freshness’ matter when determining relevance? If an employer places the same ad every Monday, to ensure that their ad stays near the top of the list when searching by date (and so jobseekers don’t assume the opening is ‘stale’ and closed), are any of these duplicates less relevant? It depends doesn’t it on the user … one user may want to see only the most current opening, while another may want to know that the firm is repeatedly advertising for the same position, perhaps implying high turnover.
So, what makes it so difficult for all of us to agree on a standard formula for relevance is that Relevance has Multiple Perspectives ... One for Each Customer:
“Our goals and skills are unique, so when we ‘search’, our perspectives on relevance are also unique. However, and this is key, as a user, my perspective counts; the perspective of the job board does not. The challenge for every job board is learning how to provide search results that meet the ‘relevance’ criteria for each and every unique user that falls within the job boards target audience.”