Just over a month ago, the New York Times ran a story about a job scam in Minneapolis and yesterday, the State of Minnesota sued the firm and its CEO Barry Trimble for scamming hundreds and perhaps thousands of job seekers. The firm, The Arthur Group, posted ads on Careerbuilder and other job boards and searched online resumes in order to bait job seekers into coming into the office for a mock interview and a free review of their resume. After thrashing the unsuspecting job seeker, The Arthur Group would try to sell a range services to help the job seeker ‘gain a competitive edge in a difficult job market.’ After shelling out thousands of dollars, job seekers received no job offers, interviews, or assistance of any kind. The state is suing Trimble and The Arthur Group for consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices and the Attorney General hopes that victims will see some sort of restitution as a result of the suit.

I do, too. An even better outcome would be that Trimble and others like him get thrown in jail. There are job scams all over the place, and they’ve gotten much worse in the current economy. Crooks like Trimble are going to continue to rip people off and steal their money until there are real consequences for their actions. Almost as important, the job classified industry has to do a better job of policing itself and calling others out when they witness behavior that helps perpetuate consumer fraud.

When a free weekly jobs newspaper runs postal job scam ads in every single one of its weekly papers every single week of the year for a decade, there should be an industry-wide tarring and feathering that shames them into stopping the ads. When job sites charge job seekers for access to job listings that are free elsewhere on the web, they should be called out so forcefully and vocally that their businesses are forced to deliver real value or shut down. And job boards that run ads for career-related services should do a better job of screening their advertisers, removing ads when consumers complain about scam ads, and making sure that everyone in and around the industry is aware of and can specifically ban those advertisers. Similarly, job aggregation sites that pool job listings from other job boards need to do a better job of filtering out job scam ads.

Employers, too, need to pay closer attention to and be more discriminating about the kinds of publications and sites in which they run their recruitment ads. If employer advertisers showed more concern and were more willing to use the weight of their ad dollars, behavior in the industry would change very quickly.  And finally, the media needs to continue highlighting these kinds of deceptive, fraudulent practices so that consumers are aware of the risks that are inherent in posting their resumes to job boards and using pay-to-post job boards, job board aggregators, and the services that are advertised on them.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comment section of a recent blog post by Alison Doyle between Alison and one of her readers. Alison wrote a post entitled “A Few Good Job Sites” in which she recommended that job seekers use job search engines such as LinkUp, Indeed, and Simplyhired. In a comment, ‘Paul’ criticized these and other aggregator sites as being very frustrating for job seekers due to the preponderance of old listings and duplicate jobs. Alison, in a reply comment, correctly points out that LinkUp’s job search engine contains no duplicate or outdated job listings because LinkUp only indexes jobs from company websites. In reading the exchange, I thought I’d weigh in on how I would define and differentiate sites like LinkUp, Indeed, and Simplyhired.

A job board aggregator such as Indeed or Simplyhired, is a site that aggregates job listings from multiple websites, usually dozens or even hundreds of other sites. These job listing contain links to the original source of the job, where job seekers can then apply for that job. In the case of Indeed and Simplyhired, job listings are supplied by hundreds of job boards all over the country that deliver a data feed of the jobs listed on their sites to Indeed and Simplyhired. Those hundreds of data feeds are then amassed into a gigantic database of listings that will undoubtedly contain duplicate listings for the same job because many employers advertise their openings on multiple job boards. Equally as problematic, the job feeds that Indeed and Simplyhired accept also contain old, outdated jobs that have already been filled, and even worse, garbage jobs that include work-at-home scams, phishing jobs, scam jobs, and listings from headhunters, staffing and temp firms, and recruiters. So in that regard, comments from ‘Paul’ on Alison’s blog are absolutely correct. Aggregators that rely on data feeds from job  boards for all or most of their job listings are very, very frustrating for job seekers (and employers, too, for that matter).

But LinkUp should not be lumped into that same criticism, as Alison rightly points out. LinkUp only aggregates job listings from company websites. We index the jobs listed on career portals from over 22,000 company websites and update LinkUp every day. We do not list any jobs from other job boards. Period. As a result, LinkUp’s job listings are always current, often unadvertised anywhere else on the web, and never fake. So while I might consider LinkUp a job aggregator given the fact that we list jobs from thousands of sites around the web, I’d more accurately classify LinkUp as a job search engine.

A job search engine is a site that actively scours the web for job listings that are only found on company websites and indexes those jobs into a giant search engine. Indexing is done with ’spiders’ that crawl other websites rather than collecting a data feed supplied by someone else. And if the company doing the indexing is a considerate and responsible one (like LinkUp), that indexing is done in an open and transparent manner in the middle of the night when site traffic is low. While both Indeed and Simplyhired list jobs from larger company websites, the vast majority of their jobs are sourced from other job boards that pay for the traffic that Indeed and Simplyhired send to them.

It may seem like a minor or even trivial distinction, but the differences between aggregators like Indeed and Simplyhired and job search engines like LinkUp have a major impact on the quality of service delivered to both job seekers and employers alike.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 17, 2009

LinkUp Announces New iPhone Application

Minneapolis, MN – LinkUp, the fastest growing job search engine on the web today, announced the release of its free iPhone application for job seekers. Exactly like the LinkUp.com website itself, LinkUp’s new iPhone app allows job seekers to search job listings that are found exclusively on company websites. LinkUp’s job search engine indexes over 22,000 company and employer websites and updates those job listings every night. As a result, jobs on LinkUp.com and its iPhone app are always current, often unadvertised anywhere else, and contain no fake jobs or scam listings.

LinkUp’s iPhone application, called ‘Job Search Engine,’ allows job seekers to search for relevant job listings by keyword, location, company, or industry. Users can also save jobs to a Favorites list and access their Favorite jobs on their computer at a later time via a web browser or RSS feed reader. Job seekers can also save specific search queries as job alerts and be notified via email of all new matching jobs.

Commented LinkUp’s CEO, Toby Dayton, “Our goal with LinkUp is to offer employers and job seekers alike the best job site on the web today, and extending LinkUp onto our first mobile platform is just another step for us in accomplishing that goal.”

Additional features of LinkUp’s free iPhone app, which also works on the iPod Touch, include email alerts when Favorite jobs are closed by the employer, the ability to instantly email relevant jobs to any email address, and the ability to apply to job openings directly from the iPhone. Finally, the LinkUp app utilizes sophisticated compression technology and is capable of delivering extremely fast search results on Edge, 3G, or WiFi networks.

About LinkUp

LinkUp is owned and operated by JobDig, an employment-focused media, technology, and advertising company that has been serving employers and job seekers since 2001. With LinkUp, the company continues its history of innovation in the industry with completely unique paid search advertising solutions for employers and the highest quality job listings available on the web today for job seekers.

As a continuation to yesterday’s post about Indeed, I wanted to highlight in further detail a portion of the interview with Indeed’s CEO, Paul Forster. Later in the same interview, a question was asked by Jason Alba of JibberJobber regarding Indeed’s revenue model. By far the most discerning question of the day, Jason asked, “I am curious to know about the differences in business models….Indeed isn’t making the $400 or whatever per job posting like the traditional job boards. How really do these aggregators monetize and how sustainable is this business model?”

Paul gave the following reply:

“Our model, Jason is quite correct, is not pay-per-posting. It’s actually pay-for-performance, pay-per-click. So it’s similar to the general search engines. When you advertise using Google AdWords, you’re paying per click, You’re also specifying a maximum price that you’re willing to pay per click and that’s the same with Indeed as well. So our main product is sponsored jobs and it’s a very easy product for job advertisers to use. All you have to do is specify a budget and the maximum price you’re willing to pay and that’s literally all you have to do because we’ve already got your jobs in our index and when you do that, when you sponsor them, they will appear above the organic results, highlighted in blue at the top of the results. They’ll get a tremendous boost in traffic and you don’t have to pick key words and you don’t have to post jobs because we’ve already got your jobs from your website. It’s very, very simple to do. It’s actually much easier to do than keyword advertising on the general search engines and we drive the traffic directly to the jobs on your site so it’s quite good from a branding point of view and from a cost-effectiveness point of view it’s also very, very good. So that’s our revenue model and basically all of our revenue comes from pay-per-click advertising on our site.”

While of course the answer is absolutely correct (as one would expect from a CEO), it is also extremely misleading. In reading it, it would be entirely understandable if you came away with the impression that it is employers themselves who are paying Indeed for clicks. Paul refers to his clients as ‘job advertisers,’ and one would certainly be excused for thinking that this means employers who are advertising jobs. Indeed certainly has a few employers that are running paid search campaigns directly, but this portion of Indeed’s customer base represents a tiny, tiny fraction of their customers. The vast, vast majority of advertisers running paid search campaigns on Indeed are the job boards who feed their jobs to Indeed and pay for the traffic or job seeker clicks that Indeed delivers to those job boards. The job advertisers that Paul speaks of in his answer are JOB BOARDS. Re-read Paul’s answer again with that in mind and it becomes apparent how brilliant his answer is in being truthful but entirely misleading. He has definitely got a future career in politics should he decide at some point in life to pursue one.

I am highlighting this element of Indeed’s business model not because it is wrong or flawed. The site does offer a slight benefit to some job seekers by allowing them to search hundreds of job boards through a single site. For job seekers that want to search Monster, Careerbuilder, and TheLadders, for example, and all of the other pay-to-post job boards that are filled with both real and garbage job listings, Indeed most definitely offers some convenience. And for job boards, Indeed can be a terrifically effective, less costly way for job boards to generate traffic to their site. As the traditional job boards continue to fall out of favor with both job seekers and employers, they are increasingly desperate to buy traffic wherever they can get it, and Indeed absolutely fulfills that need.

What I take issue with is the fact that both Indeed and Simplyhired pretend to be serving job seekers and employers, when in fact they are primarily serving job boards. Again, this is a perfectly acceptable and most likely a highly lucrative business model. I also believe that Indeed and Simplyhired are extremely smart to embrace a pay-per-click transaction model. Paid search is, without question, migrating into recruitment advertising faster than most would have predicted (as well it should be), and those two job aggregators are certainly helping accelerate that trend. But I believe strongly that players in the recruitment advertising space, regardless of their business model, have an obligation towards the largest and most important stakeholders in the space – job seekers and employers.

By serving up scam jobs, phishing jobs, work-at-home scams, and other garbage listings, Indeed is failing to meet their obligation to job seekers. And by publishing duplicate job listings from the hundreds of job board customers that feed their jobs to Indeed, Indeed is failing to meet their obligation to both job seekers and employers. I certainly understand that few businesses can execute their vision flawlessly, and some amount of leeway should always given, especially to start-ups that are helping, to some degree, transform an industry.

I’d grant that leeway to Indeed were it not for the fact that they are appallingly disingenuous about their business model and who their real customers are.

Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed.com, was recently interviewed in a podcast and had some interesting things to say about their business, the Indeed job search engine, and the current environment for employers and job seekers. One of the questions posed to Paul centered around Indeed being inundated with garbage job listings including scam listings, spam jobs, work-at-home scams, and phishing/identity theft jobs. At first, Paul didn’t answer that part of a 2-part question, but he did later on in the interview which I commend him highly for. Paul responded to the question as follows:

“[bogus jobs] are something that we take very, very seriously. We take steps to remove jobs and sources of jobs that are low quality. We have a lot of aspects to our search algorithms that are designed to do exactly that. It’s a constant challenge. To some extent it’s a cat and mouse game because people are going to put up jobs that are low quality. That’s inevitable. Just on the web not everything is going to be good quality.

But we believe Indeed is better than the alternative services for actually filtering and getting rid of those low quality job listings. We try to be as responsive as possible to feedback so when people email us or contact us and say, look, this job source is not good quality or their’s spam in there, or some sort of phishing kinds of things that you occasionally see, we make sure to respond as quickly as we can to remove that kind of content. I think it’s a very good question and something that is a priority for us.”

Again, I applaud Paul for addressing the issue and being open and honest about what is unquestionably a huge problem for Indeed. Because they aggregate the vast majority of their job listings from other job boards that have all these ‘bogus’ jobs in them, Indeed’s service is plagued by those same garbage listings.

Having said that, I take issue with two of the points Paul makes. The first is that if Indeed were truly serious about addressing the issue of spam jobs, phishing jobs, work-at-home scams, etc., they could easily refuse to accept job feeds from any job board that delivered such jobs. That would eliminate the problem immediately and create a far better service for legitimate employers and job seekers alike. Of course, that would also eliminate almost all of Indeed’s revenue which is generated from job boards such as Monster, Careerbuilder, TheLadders, etc. that pay Indeed for the traffic Indeed delivers to their site.

Unfortunately like most job boards, especially in the current environment, it’s near impossible for Indeed to be serious about placing the job seeker and the quality of their user experience ahead of revenue. It’s especially difficult for Indeed, because their customers are not actually job seekers or employers but rather the job boards whose jobs Indeed publishes. These job board customers are the ones that pay Indeed for the traffic Indeed delivers to their sites. Indeed’s concern about quality job listings is genuine only to the extent that it impacts their ability to deliver and monetize the job seeker traffic that they send to their customers – the job boards that publish their job listings, bogus ones included, on Indeed.

The second issue I have is that Indeed is better than the alternatives in filtering out these ‘bogus’ jobs. Indeed may or may not be better than Simplyhired at filtering out garbage listings, but neither job search engine compares to LinkUp which ONLY indexes job listings from company websites. Because LinkUp does not publish jobs from other job boards, there are no scam jobs, phishing jobs, spam jobs, work-at-home scams, or ‘bogus’ jobs. Almost as important, there are no duplicate listings on LinkUp because our job search engine only aggregates jobs from a single source – the employer’s corporate career portal on their company website.

Those two factors, combined with a bunch of unique and sophisticated features that create an unparalleled user experience, are the reasons why LinkUp is growing at a far faster rate than both Indeed and Simplyhired.  I guess job seekers have found a better alternative than Indeed.

I am very curious to know if Apple is generating any revenue from app developers to promote their iPhone applications. I have to imagine that some apps are paying a large fee to be included in Apple’s full-page newspaper ads promoting the app store and the iPhone. If anyone has seen any articles or commentary on this, please post a comment.

Along those same lines, are apps paying any fees to be promoted in Apple stores? Again, the exposure for free and paid apps is extraordinary, and certainly worth a lot of money to the lucky few who are included in Apple’s prominent in-store promotion.

This is a recent picture from the Apple store on 5th avenue in New York. On a random Thursday night, there were at least 200 people in the store, and daily traffic has to be off the charts. Careerbuilder’s iPhone app is the only job board featured anywhere in the store.

There’s been a ridiculous amount of coverage lately in the recruiting industry about Twitter’s impact on the space. I am a fan of Twitter and have found it to be an advantageous tool to leverage for specific applications in our business. I also think that it is an interesting and potentially valuable tool for job seekers and employers. But the attention being paid to Twitter in the recruiting business is way overblown and far outweighs its true value in the process of finding a job or an employee.

Before anyone freaks out and dismisses this post with a “you don’t get it” or “you’re an idiot,” I would argue quite vehemently that I do and I’m not. Twitter is a really cool tool in the social media space, and it has definite value for job seekers and employers. There are lots of jobs being distributed into and through Twitter, and job seekers should be spending some time exploring what’s out there via Twitter. Employers and job boards too should be leveraging Twitter as a means to distribute their jobs to a wider, possibly different, audience as well as perhaps more convenient channel (at least for some). But Twitter is no different that any other channel (print, web, radio, TV, mobile, RSS, newsletters, podcasts, etc.) that employers and job seekers should be exploring to improve their chances of successfully accomplishing their respective goals. But diversification across multiple channels is critical, and the notion that Twitter alone is sufficient to achieve success is patently absurd. Even more ludicrous are the recruitment advertising businesses springing up that are based entirely around Twitter.

As just a small test of Twitter, I searched for Creative Director on Twitterjobsearch.com. There were 6,000+ search results.

I scrolled down a bit and clicked on advertischicago’s job for a creative director/Art, and was taken to AdvertisChicago’s Twitter page.

After clicking on the same job again, I was taken to Indeed.com’s page, where I discovered that the job was no longer available on Oddskills.com, the original source of the job listing.

So after 3 clicks, I found that a job that was tweeted about only 2 hours ago was no longer available and that the listing itself had traveled through 4 places. This was the first job I clicked on, and the experience was just as useless as any job search on Indeed, SimplyHired, Monster, CareerBuilder, or any other jobs site that has old, outdated, and duplicative job listings, and/or fake/fraudulent/scam jobs. It took me just one try to find exactly the type of experience that I assumed I would find sooner or later, and that is why I am confident that I do ‘get it’ and that I’m not an idiot when I dismiss the wave of job-related businesses that are basing their entire service model around Twitter.

SimplyHired announced last week that it was making a greater effort to combat the blight on its site in the form of scam jobs, outdated listings, and duplicate job posts. SimplyHired bills itself as the largest job search engine on the web, pulling the vast majority of its jobs from other job boards such as Monster, Careerbuilder, Yahoo, etc. As a result of pulling in jobs from other job boards, the site is subject to the same problems that plague most job boards – scam jobs, spam jobs, outdated listings, fake jobs, and postings from 3rd parties such as recruiters, headhunters, staffing companies, etc. SimplyHired and Indeed (another job board aggregator) have the addditional problem of duplicate listings because they pull jobs in from multiple job boards and don’t screen out those jobs that might have been posted on more than one job board.

In any event, I was amused by the solution that SimplyHired proposed to combat the problem: asking job seekers using their site to flag all of the bad listings they publish on their site. Can you imagine a grocery store stocking the produce section with a bunch of rotten produce and asking customers to help sort through the good and the bad? SimplyHired is doing exactly the same thing. Here is their press release (with my bolding added):

Simply Hired Announces New Feature to Remove Scam Jobs

“Flag this Job” Feature to Further Protect SimplyHired.com Job Seekers from Scam Job Listings

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Simply Hired, the largest job search engine and recruitment advertising network, today announced the launch of a new feature, “Flag this Job.” While Simply Hired already has many safeguards against scam jobs, this feature enables job seekers to help each other by pointing to listings that are potentially fraudulent.

Job scams are not a new problem; fake listings have existed since the early days of classified ads. Reports of online job scams have increased in these challenging economic times, making the already time-consuming job search process even more frustrating. Simply Hired understands this issue and has pro-actively implemented—and will continue to implement—tools such as “Flag this Job” and procedures to help insulate job seekers from this growing concern.

“While scam and spam jobs represent only one tenth of one percent of the three million postings on SimplyHired.com, we have zero tolerance for them,” said Tejas Saraiya, Director of Marketing and Products, Simply Hired. “Enabling the millions of job seekers on our site to flag inappropriate job listings helps us to improve job quality and remove scam and spam jobs from our site more quickly.”

Simply Hired’s new flagging feature can be easily utilized by job seekers on the SimplyHired.com site. Throughout the search results pages, users will see a new icon under each job listing labeled “Flag.” Users may flag a job by clicking the icon below the job listing and choosing the reason they are flagging the job. A job posting can be flagged for a number of reasons: it looks like a scam/spam posting, the job is expired, the link to the posting is broken, or it is a duplicate listing. The job listing will not be automatically removed from the job search results, but will be marked as flagged and reported to Simply Hired’s data quality team.

The flagging feature allows the Simply Hired team to investigate all flagged jobs and remove listings from our database that are faulty or fraudulent in nature. This is an active way for job seekers to improve the quality of search results for both themselves and others.

First off, I absolutely and sincerely congratulate SimplyHired for acknowledging a significant problem that afflicts most job boards in the industry: old listings, fake posts, and scam jobs. They have also courageously acknowledged a problem unique to their business model: duplicate job listings. Taken together, SimplyHired has come to realize and publicly stated how frustrating these issues are for job seekers. But rather than fixing the source of the problem and eliminating the garbage listings from their jobs database in the first place (which is precisely what they’d do if they actually abided by their purported ‘zero tolerance’ policy), they are asking job seekers to do the work for them.

What I’d recommend to job seekers is to start using LinkUp, the largest job search engine on the web that only indexes jobs from company websites. Because LinkUp only lists jobs from company career sites, the jobs are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake. And because LinkUp only pulls job listings from a single source (the employer site itself), there are no duplicate listings. Today, there are 19,630 companies with 408,517 real, current jobs on the site. When a job seeker clicks on a job found on LinkUp, they are taken directly to that specific listing on the company’s website where, in most cases, they can apply for the position directly with the employer’s applicant tracking system. I will freely admit that we, too, have a ‘flag this job’ feature on the site because there are occasionally some busted links to the position on the employer’s website, but we’ve eliminated all of the blight that SimplyHired is desperately trying to deal with.

At LinkUp, we don’t ask our customers to help sort out the rotten tomatoes.

In honor of Paul Dailing, I am going to continue to be lazy on occasion and simply dump a pile of stories and headlines into a blog post regarding the death of the daily newspaper (and maybe on the recruitment classified front as well). It continues to be fascinating to me to watch an industry implode, and the story continues to evolve in interesting, educational, and amusing ways. So here are the most recent stories that caught my attention….

• The dailies’ problems may finally be solved! Washington is on the case, and bailout funds may be just around the corner…

• Another ‘Innovate or Die’ story (and some even have a decent idea or 2)

• John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, likes newspapers but only because they’re important to his baseball franchise. Strange timing that the New York Times (which owns the Boston Globe) is also looking to sell its stake in the Red Sox to generate some liquidity

• McClatchy is at risk of being delisted from the NYSE

• Winning the ‘No Shit’ award for the decade, Sam Zell declares that his acqusition of The Tribune Company was a mistake

• The idea of generating micro-payment revenue for newspaper content gains steam  with new venture Journalism Online

• Yahoo prepares HotJobs for eventual sale

• Shareholders of The New York Times are at risk of being seriously diluted….and there was also an excellent, excellent story about Arthur Sulzberger in the current issue of Vanity Fair

• The Cincinnati Enquirer is cutting the number of days that it runs classifieds

• The web tops newspapers as a source for news (didn’t this happen in like 2002?). Guess not….

• Newspapers are selling buildings to raise cash, but no one is buying….

Thanks to Chris Russell of JobBoarders for organizing a really entertaining discussion yesterday on a variety of topics relating to the job board industry. Also participating were Joel Cheesman, Eric Shannon, and Joe Stubblebine.

During the conversation, I went off on a slight rant (not quite meds-worthy in my mind, but that might be up for debate) against TheLadders and the scam they are running that rips off unsuspecting job seekers and tarnishes the entire industry. TheLadders is doing nothing more than scraping jobs from other job boards, aggregating as many jobs as they can get in their database (flawed as that may be given all the legacy issues such as scam jobs, old,old,old jobs, work-at-home scams, and identity theft phishing jobs, etc. that jobs from sites like Monster and Careerbuilder and Hotjobs bring to the database), applying a shoddy filter against the listings to try to identify only $100,000 and up salaries, and then selling job seekers access to the resulting listings. It’s as bad as any scam I’ve seen or written about in the industry, equal in many ways to the criminal behavior of the Employment Guide and the postal ads they run in their thinning publications every week. Like others (here and here), I’d put them all in the same bucket and add serial spammer Hound.com as well.

The question from yesterday’s job boarders podcast that spurred the discussion was whether or not job sites should consider trying to generate new revenue streams from job seekers. We’ve never done this at either JobDig or LinkUp for a variety of reasons, but most fundamentally because that’s not our business. We’re in the advertising business, and we offer employers unique and valuable advertising vehicles to reach quality candidates for their open positions. I’m not sure what you’d call the business model of charging a subscription fee for recycled listings from other job boards, but it’s not a business I’d want to be in.