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
- Indeed
- SimplyHired
- GoogleBase
- Jobster
- Just-Posted
- CareerBuilder
- LiveExpo
- Oodle
- Jobs.com
- JobCentral
- Monster
- HotJobs
- GetTheJob
- America’s Job Exchange
- 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.