Job Search Engine Guide

You Can’t Buy My Love

   

But you can buy a detailed report describing the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition. 

   

Interested in the testing methodology and detailed results for each round?  Curious why your site scored below your competitors?  Looking for specific usability and performance analysis that can help guide future development?  It’s all available to you in a format that uniquely compares your site to each of the tested sites in the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition.

   

If you follow the Job Search Engine Guide, you know that I refuse to accept advertising of any kind.  If I ever do, then I think you should question my objectivity.  But objective tests like the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition require considerable time; and one way to make this a sustainable evaluation process, providing guidance year after year, is to sell the detail-level findings to job sites as competitive intelligence.

   

Price?  $4,995 for a customized report for your site; or $9,995 for the report plus an onsite visit to discuss the findings and recommendations.

   

Let’s be clear though … at the end of the day, what I really want is your commitment to site improvement … the fee is simply a crude way to make sure that we’re both focused on the same goal.

   

Do you want to improve?

   

2007 Top Sites for Job Search – Indeed Wins Round 1

   

Indeed takes the top spot in round one of the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition – not a surprise really since Indeed took overall honors in 2006.

   

In this first round of competition, fifteen of the top general job sites were tested to find jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Tulsa, OK.  To score well, sites needed sufficient ad content for Tulsa, plus they needed search technology that was powerful enough to find matching jobs without returning mismatches. 

   

Surprises in the first round? 

   

Craigslist is the first site to be eliminated from further competition as a result of a last place finish.  I’ve never been a fan of Craigslist (see here, here and here for background), but going in I expected them to finish mid-pack … after all, Craigslist does have a strong following.  In the end, simplistic search technology and limited ad volume in Tulsa were Craig’s undoing.  Yes, the results would have been different if the test location had been San Francisco; but, doesn’t that make Craig’s more like a collection of regional sites as opposed to a national site?  I think so.

   

HotJobs and Monster in the bottom five … ironic that two of the big-three job boards garner so much traffic and yet performed so poorly in this round.   

   

Just-Posted, a site that almost no one has heard of (Alexa traffic rank = 1,559,714) was fifth, leveraging their next-generation search technology to muscle past many of the big guns.

   

Best Job Sites – Round 1 Results

   

1. Indeed
2. SimplyHired
3. GoogleBase
4. Jobster
5. Just-Posted
6. CareerBuilder
7. LiveExpo
8. Oodle
9. Jobs.com
10. JobCentral
11. Monster
12. HotJobs
13. GetTheJob
14. America’s Job Exchange
15. Craigslist   

   

   

So let’s head to the round 2 challenge – finding jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Boston, MA.  May the best job site win.

   

2007 Top Sites for Job Search

   

Who will be first?  Which of the following fifteen sites provides the best combination of content, features, and ease-of-use for active job search?

   

To make my list of 2007 competitors, a site must provide national coverage of the job market and contain ads for most types of jobs in the economy – for simplicity, let’s refer to these competitors as general job sites.

   

As you can imagine, with 40,000+ job sites to choose from, there are many excellent niche sites that can be better choices than any of these fifteen general sites in certain cases – e.g. theLadders in the $100k+ market, and Dice in the tech market, to name only two.  However, as good as some of these niche boards are, their ad volume is often quite low, so even dedicated niche board users will often watch one or more general job sites when actively searching for a new job.

   

So which of the following general job sites is best in 2007?  That’s what we’ll find out by challenging the competitors to a series of tests, with the poorest performer in each test eliminated from further competition.  In a competition like this, it’s just as important for each competitor to have few weaknesses as it is to have strengths.  May the best site win.

   

   

First challenge – Find jobs for ten hypothetical jobseekers in Tulsa, OK.  Who wins?  Who goes home?  Stay tuned.

   

   

The Big Three

CareerBuilder

HotJobs

Monster

   

Vertical Integrators

Indeed

Oodle

SimplyHired

   

General Classifieds

Craigslist

GoogleBase

LiveExpo

   

Federally Endorsed*

America’s Job Exchange

JobCentral

Jobs.com

   

Next-Gen Search

GetTheJob

Jobster

Just-Posted

   

   

* In preparation for the shutdown of America’s Job Bank, the Department of Labor published Training and Employment Notice 27-06, which included a copy of a Federal Register Notice outlining the criteria for inclusion in a list of links of private sites providing functionality similar to AJB.   

   

High Hopes for Itzbig

   

Joel has posted a great interview with itzbig CEO Jim Hammock … it is well worth the 10 minutes to view the video.

   

Jim highlights four key areas of focus for itzbig … areas that regular readers of this blog will recognize as weaknesses in many of the current job boards.  If itzbig delivers on all four, they’ll certainly be worthy of a high rank in a crowded market.

   

Quality – rather than selling ads, or trying to maximize ad impressions, itzbig is focusing on delivering high-quality job matches between jobseekers and recruiters.  Users will see match relevance scores and be able to set minimum thresholds to weed out low quality matches.

   

Efficiency – rather than delivering deluges of marginal quality matches, itzbig is focused on delivering fewer high-quality matches. Finding diamonds shouldn’t be as time consuming.

   

Privacy – rather than a typical caveat-emptor approach to business, itzbig is promising a high level of protection for personal information.  Users will search in a confidential environment.  Frankly, I think this is a key to connecting with passive job seekers.  I may be the exception, but I no longer use Jobster because of the perception that others can watch my actions on the site … when it comes to searching for a new job while employed, most of us would like the option to keep it private.

   

Usability – rather than delivering a product with interstitial ads, or a product with sponsored ads that obscure more relevant results, itzbig says they are committed to usability first, and that they will rollout slowly to ensure that they don’t lose focus on usability.  Of course, usability, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder … nonetheless, I have to give props to a firm that states that they are highly focused on usability.

   

Soundzbig to me!

 

Something for Nothing – a Gift or a Gaffe

    

Jobster joined the free classified club today – and Jason says “…the free posting plan makes Craigslist a near-term competitive target” (according to GigaOM). 

   

I’m probably in the minority when I say that free is the wrong price for job ads.  Frankly, I don’t believe that the best things in life are free … perhaps it’s my economics training and the concept of opportunity cost that gets in the way; or maybe it’s the adages that ‘if it sounds too good to be true it probably is’, or ‘there’s no free lunch’.  In any case, call me a free-skeptic.

   

What if I’m right?  What if …

   

… employers care more about access to quality candidates than they do about ad prices?  GoogleBase has been offering free job postings for over a year … with no significant buzz or impact to my knowledge.  Monster does over $1 billion per year in revenue (the opposite of free) by selling access to candidates … in January Monster had roughly 20 times the traffic of Jobster.  It would appear that employers are less concerned about the price than they are about broad applicant exposure.

   

… jobseekers care more about finding real job opportunities (open jobs advertised without spam) than they do about the absolute number of ads?  For all of the success of Craigslist, they’ve still found the need to institute fees for some ads in some markets to help reduce abuse.  And, at least at the outset, Jobster says that ads on their site will never expire … a sure recipe for a site that grows full of stale ads for closed positions.  So who will pay, if not employers, for the policing and pruning of inappropriate and old content?

   

Bottom line, I just don’t see how free ads improve the match experience for either employers or jobseekers.

   

Do you?  If so, let me know.

   

   

   

Update:  For a better post on Jobster's new business model, check out Andrew Marritt's thoughts on Resourcing Strategies.

   

The Ultimate Job Search Engine

   

Are you looking for (or trying to build) the ultimate job search engine? Jeff Tokarz, founder of Just-Posted, asked me to describe the key features that jobseekers look for in job boards and job search engines.

   

Check out the post on Jeff’s blog and let me know if I missed anything that is important to you.

   

And Jeff, thanks for asking!

   

Bob  :-)

   

Craigslist Does the Honorable Thing

   

As reported by Joel Cheesman, Craigslist has apparently “…sent cease and desist letters to Jobster, Simply Hired, Indeed and other vertical job search engines to stop spidering their job content.” 

   

Representatives of Indeed, Jobster, and Simply Hired were with Joel last week at the Direct Employers annual meeting, so I’m sure they would have set him straight if the word on the street was incorrect.

   

This is great news for all parties. 

   

A few months ago, in a five-part series on how Craigslist Degrades Vertical Job Search, I concluded that 93% of the Craigslist ads found on Jobster qualified as junk.

   

So my question for Craig Newmark at the time was:  What good is free, if the result includes so much junk?

   

And my question for Jason Goldberg, Paul Forester and Gautam Godhwani was:  Why would you degrade the quality of your product by including content from the free Craigslist sites?

   

In the end, Craigslist does us a favor by placing a wall around their low-quality content.   

   

Thanks Craig!

   

Netflix Offers $1 Million for Improved Predictions

   

Netflix is curious … to the tune of one million dollars.  If there’s a better way to help customers find the movies they’ll love, then it could make a big difference to their customers and their business. 

   

So Netflix is offering $1 million to anyone who can improve their prediction accuracy by 10%.

   

I’m stunned.  In an industry where the average transaction is under $20 per month, Netflix is willing to pay seven figures for a 10% improvement in match accuracy.  Incredible!

   

What’s the value of the average job placement?  Even if an employer uses Craigslist or Google Base, where job ads are free, the time investment to place an ad and screen applicants is far greater than any transaction in the video rental industry.

   

Yet when was the last time you read about a job board’s major investment in search/match accuracy?  With the exception of Career Builder, who licenses search technology from FAST, other job sites seem content to roll their own relatively simplistic search … offloading the job of sorting through mediocre results to employers and job seekers.

   

With millions at stake, a major player in the electronic job market will eventually seize on search/match as a key differentiator.  Imagine the press coverage, customer interest, and the speed at which a firm could vault into the lead if they employed the concept demonstrated by Netflix?

   

Bravo Netflix … a brilliant idea!

   

Simply Hired Preferred over Monster and HotJobs

   

You know it’s been a tough week for Simply Hired when winning a BusinessWeek Online Best-of-the-Web award generates the following quote from Gautam Godhwani, CEO of Simply Hired: “Indeed, this is quite an honor … Although it did ruin a perfectly terrible week.”

   

No doubt I’ve contributed to SH’s pain by expressing my displeasure, here and here, with the execution of their new pay-per-click advertising model.

   

Joel Cheesman, in just call me ian, wonders if Kay Luo’s (director of marketing at SH) strategy “…was to get my name wrong so that I’d write about how she screwed up” 

   

And Barry Hurd, on the Recruiting.com site isn’t buying the conclusion that SH is Simply the Best, by commenting:  “I can't really agree with Business Week on this one. In fact the blunder I see is fundamentally against most of what my marketing and recruiting experience in general would say.”

   

Nonetheless, readers of BusinessWeek Online did choose Simply Hired above Monster, HotJobs, LinkedIn and Mediabistro – and I agree wholeheartedly with this conclusion.

   

Does this mean Simply Hired is Simply the Best?  Not in my book.  Currently I rank Jobster and Indeed ahead of them.

   

Business Week Online readers might have agreed if these firms had been included in the initial list of choices.  But as you can see in the published survey results, Jobster, The Ladders, Craigslist, Dice and Indeed were all write-in candidates.   We’re talking some heavy hitters that were initially excluded from the survey.

   

As with all surveys … and blogger opinions too … your mileage may vary.

   

Craigslist in a Pickle – Jobster Caught in Crossfire

   

Last week, the Big Cheese broke the story that the wheels have fallen off the relationship between Craigslist and Jobster.

   

Jason Goldberg, president of Jobster, responded:  “We were actively working with Craigslist business and technical contacts at all level of their organization prior to our initial product launch.  In fact, the day before we went live to our customers, Craigslist confirmed by e-mail that we were fine and all systems go. They then changed their mind post launch. We are not sure why the change of heart. The best response we have from them is that they have decided not to support any 3rd party posts.”

   

After my recent beating on Craigslist for duplicates, cross-site postings, and bogus ‘jobs’, it’s no surprise that CL isn’t interested in making it easier for a few employers to abuse the system.  Jobster would have been a good partner; but it’s easy to envision a flood of 3^rd party sites catering to unscrupulous posters.

   

The real problem here is Craigslist’s bizarre business model – part commercial, part philanthropic, part community service, and part walled garden – that does not reflect the world in which we, or they, live.

   

§         To keep things local, CL creates sites in larger cities and attempts to prevent cross posting – even though we live in a connected, highly mobile world;

   

§         To pay the bills, CL charges for job ads in a few cities, but mostly they give away this service – even though they know that ‘free classifieds’ result in abuse; and,

   

§         To create online communities, CL allows all kinds of content – even though most of the content, and users, generate high traffic volume but no revenue.

   

Joel’s take is that “Craigslist’s decision not to support Jobster’s direct post feature is unfortunate as it flies smack in the face of delivering the best user experience. Craigslist would prefer that each employer post their jobs to craigslist manually one at a time vs. having a service like Jobster help them manage multiple postings.”

   

While true, CL views employers as secondary customers.  CL’s primary customers are the individuals within each CL community; so decisions are made in an effort to improve the quality of the user experience for individuals, not employers.

   

So if you’re a 3^rd-party, focused on helping employers … any relationship you attempt with CL is doomed. 

   

Perhaps someday Craigslist will tire of the pickle created by their current business model. If that day comes, the current free-riders abusing their system will squeal; but the majority of us will benefit from higher quality content and an improved user experience.