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 Alison, in a reply comment, correctly points out that LinkUp’s job search engine contains no duplicate or outdated job listings because LinkUp only indexes jobs from company websites.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 Equally as problematic, the job feeds that Indeed and Simplyhired accept also contain old, outdated jobs that have already been filled, and even worse, garbage jobs that include work-at-home scams, phishing jobs, scam jobs, and listings from headhunters,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.

Not surprisingly, there’s been a ton of news of late surrounding the daily newspaper industry, but the summary of it all is that as bad as things are for the dailies, these businesses are incredibly gifted at finding new, imaginative ways to make things even worse.

• Newspaper revenues are down 29%, and papers around the country continue to crater. Freedom Communications, owner of 33 dailies (including the Orange County Register) and 70 weekly newspapers, filed for bankruptcy this week while the San Francisco Chronicle is cutting more employees. Ann Arbor lost its daily entirely, the L.A. Times is restructuring its sales force (as if that’ll help in the least), and Rupert has shuttered his free London Paper. With no attractive offers, the Austin American Statesman was taken off the block, while local investors purchased dailies in Philadelphia and bidders are emerging for the Boston Globe.

• Want to see local movie listings in the paper? Sorry.

• The debate over paid news continues to rage with more stories here and here.

• Rather than charging for online news, maybe the answer is better distribution through e-readers or ‘hyperdistribution.’

• Due to a string of bankruptcies that have placed media companies into the hands of creditors (like some cruel game of hot potato), the largest publisher in the country at the moment is….J.P. Morgan. The Banking giant now controls Readers Digest, Source Interlink Media and American Media Inc. which have combined revenue of just over $5 billion.

• Local news is a big deal these days and is being looked to as the savior for local dailies (as if it hadn’t always been). As everyone except daily newspaper publishers has known for years and years, the strategy of gutting local coverage in favor of generic AP stories and reruns from other newspapers has proved fatal for almost every local daily in the country. Now, after virtually every newspaper in the country is either on its last legs or already in bankruptcy, local news is back in favor.

• Local news is even big enough to be fueling some M&A activity. Local blog site Examiner.com has acquied NowPublic for an undisclosed sum. NowPublic raised $10.6 million last summer from lead investor Rho Ventures and seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund.

• Even the most dysfunctional paper in the country is seeing the local light. The Tribune Company has started a local blog network to boost its online coverage of all things local. Too little, too late, I’m sure, and they’ll undoubtedly find a way to screw it up, but at least they got the right answer eventually.

• Speaking of the most dysfunctional paper in the country, Tribune has finally sold the Cubs. Unfortuantely, only now is the greatest fraud in the industry’s final chapter receiving the scrutiny it should have from the very start.

• And finally, in the most baffling, head-scratch-inducing development over recent weeks, the same businesses that were slow to appreciate and effectively leverage the digital tsunami that swept across the industry are now letting go of the very people who have any chance of saving them.

It continues to dumbfound me how much this industry enjoys digging its own grave.

Since LinkUp launched its Facebook app last week, I’ve spent more time than usual looking at the ways in which companies are leveraging Facebook (and social media in general) in their recruiting efforts. There are some outstanding examples of best practices and companies are really doing some amazing things. One such company is Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, who have an excellent Fan page on Facebook that is clearly a valuable component of their recruiting and talent acquisition efforts. I will admit up front that Hyatt just installed LinkUp’s Facebook app (which allows them to pull jobs from their corporate website onto their Facebook page), so while my views are most definitely biased, I think anyone looking objectively at what Hyatt is doing on Facebook would agree that they stand as a perfect case study for some important best practices.

Hyatt’s Facebook page is branded with a ‘HyattCareers’ URL, making it easy to find, the page has 8,509 fans, and there is a ton of content throughout the page. Most importantly, there is a real dialogue going on between job seekers and people within Hyatt. Comments from job seekers posted to Hyatt’s wall are answered individually in a timely manner with thorough, thoughtful replies. While most answers direct people to www.ExploreHyatt.jobs, there is usually some personalization in the answer, providing an indication that the comments are actually being read by someone who is interested in engaging with Hyatt’s fans, customers, and potential job candidates.

In terms of job listings (which are powered by LinkUp’s Facebook app ‘Current Jobs at Our Company’), Hyatt lists 968 jobs from their company career portal on their Facebook page. These jobs appear in a widget on their Wall, as well as on a separate jobs tab across the top. This makes it easy for fans and job seekers to find current opportunities at Hyatt from throughout their hotel and resort network, and each and every job listing links directly to that specific position on Hyatt’s career page where job seekers can apply for jobs straight into Hyatt’s applicant tracking system (ATS).

There is no doubt that social media is the hottest topic in recruiting these days, and Hyatt’s Facebook page perfectly demonstrates exactly why that is the case.

More so than any other large media company, the New York Times is doing a phenomenal service for the unemployed by prominently highlighting the job scams that prey on job seekers. Over the past few weeks, the Times has run a number of stories that describe the most common job scams and ripoff services that are thriving as job seekers become increasingly desperate in their job search. Unfortunately, most of these scams rely on pay-to-post job boards (especially high traffic ones) to lure unsuspecting job seekers by posting fake job ads.

In a New York Times story yesterday, the Arthur Group was identified as a scam headhunting firm that posted ads throughout Careerbuilder to attract and dupe its victims. That story accompanied a front page Times story that exposed ITS and Benchmark Professional Careers as bogus ‘career management’ or ‘career marketing’ companies that add little to no value for their clients yet charge absurdly high fees (paid up-front, of course). The companies, and others like them, have been sued by and banned from doing business in various states, but they still manage to survive and thrive like cockroaches.

In another Times piece from August 8th, entitled ‘Online Scammers Target The Jobless,’ Riva Richmond identifies the most common job scams that plague traditional pay-to-post job boards today. These scams include up-front payments for materials or training, links to online forms that result in identity theft, mystery shopper positions, work-from-home scams, and ‘money-mule’ or reshipper scams. In all of these cases, the scams rely on pay-to-post job boards (Geebo.com was cited as one example in the article) to find and dupe their victims.

In that article, one of the pieces of advice that Richmond offers is to use niche job boards rather than the large mega-job boards like Careerbuilder and Monster. This is decent advice and probably would eliminate a sizeable chunk of risk, but even better advice for job seekers would be to use job sites such as LinkUp that do not allow companies to post jobs directly onto the site. LinkUp is a job search engine that only lists jobs that are found on company and employer websites themselves. Equally as important, LinkUp also does not list job openings from other job boards (which carry the same risks therefore as the mega-job boards themselves), which makes LinkUp entirely unique among job search engines.

In any event, I applaud the New York Times for prominently highlighting the fraud that unfortunately afflicts a large portion of the recruitment advertising industry. I wish more people in our industry were doing more themselves to protect job seekers.

LinkUp just released a new Facebook application that allows companies to fully and effectively leverage the power of the world’s largest social network in their recruiting strategies. The app (which can be found here), called ‘Current Jobs At Our Company,’ allows companies to publish jobs from their corporate website to their company’s Facebook page. The app is easy to install and works automatically behind the scenes, requiring no additional work because the job listings on Facebook are updated automatically to reflect any changes to the jobs on the company’s website itself.

Most importantly, when a job seeker clicks on a job on Facebook, they are brought straight to that exact job listing on the company’s own website. The other critical aspect to LinkUp’s Facebook application is that it adds a specific ‘Jobs’ tab across the top of the company’s Faceebook page, so in effect companies and organizations can extend their exact corporate career portal from their company website onto Facebook.

As an aside, LinkUp is the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to Comscore data. We only index jobs that are found exclusively on company websites, and as a result, there are no garbage job listings, no phishing scam ads, no work-at-home scams, and no ads from 3rd party intermediaries. The site is update every day to reflect any changes on the company websites we index, so the jobs on LinkUp are always current. Equally as important, most companies do not advertise all of their jobs, so LinkUp contains a ton of jobs that cannot be found anywhere else on the web. And because we only index jobs from a single source (the company’s website itself), there are no duplicate job listings. Unlike other job search engines that primarily serve other job boards, LinkUp’s mission is to serve job seekers and employers. We are currently indexing over 21,000 company websites, and the site contains 392,436 jobs (as of today). Companies that choose to can run paid search campaigns on their job listings and pay for candidate traffic to their company website on a per-click basis.

LinkUp – always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

For more details on LinkUp’s Facebook app for employers, click here.

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.

Taking a few weeks off from posting the latest headlines concerning the plight of the dailies has created a massive backlog of items to list. I am not sure if the pace of noteworthy events is accelerating or if it just seems that way due to my short hiatus, but I have about 3 blog posts worth of items to try to get through this week, so here’s the first batch:

• The saga of the Boston Globe continues, with growing acrimony between management and the unions.

• Global readership of newspapers continues to rise, and readership of and traffic stats surrounding newspaper websites continues to lend hope that there is an answer for some dailies who are smart enough with their web offerings.

• News that Craigslist’s revenue will soon top $100M provides further proof that while the site has certainly played a role in stealing classifieds away from the dailies, the credit the site receives in the mainstreams press’ coverage of the death of the dailies is massively overblown.

• Given the recent public statement from Google that they will not be the savior for newspapers, perhaps Apple will step in to carry the day. Or maybe it’s the gaming industry. Or maybe it’s the oft-mentioned ‘user-generated content’ that is helping Hearst’s TV station sites.

• Newspapers are finally catching on to the power and appeal of online video. It seems to be working for Philly.com.

• What a shock! Sam Zell might lose control of his not-so-beloved Tribune. I hope the holders of the $8.6 billion in Tribune debt have fun with their new prize.

• For a preview of what’s coming for almost every single major metro market in the U.S., check out the battle in San Diego between a non-profit online news company (Voice of San Diego), a local for-profit online news site (San Diego News Network), and a cratering daily (San Diego Union Tribune) that was purchased by a private equity group with no experience in publishing primarily because of the daily’s real estate holdings. (Sounds pretty similar to the situation in Minneapolis, although we’ve swapped the local online-only, for-profit website for another daily over in St. Paul).

• True/Slant, the latest entrant into the for-profit, online news & journalism fray offers another possible glimpse into the future of online journalism.

• Right on the ball just like they were in accurately assessing credit risk in the housing, mortgage, and banking sectors over the past decade, Moody’s has released a report on the daily newspaper industry. In the report, John Pucalla writes:

“Ultimately, we expect the industry will need to reverse the vertical integration strategy through cross-industry collaboration and outsourcing print production and distribution processes,” said Puchalla. “Although newspapers may lose some of their in-house control over press time, they would also release resources to beef up investment in content and technology.”

In English, that means newspapers are over-leveraged, crippled by unions, and suffering tremendously due to chronic under-investment in value-added journalism and online technology. What timely and prescient insight.

• In a non-daily related story, the Computer History Museum has posted two fascinating documents that provide some visibility into the earliest days of Apple. These should be heartening for every entrepreneur and early-stage company that’s had to make use of their magic crystal ball to gaze into the future with perfect clarity.

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.

One of the most frustrating experiences I have with newspaper sites is trying to find a story on a newspaper’s website that I just read in the print edition. It happens quite regularly that I will read something interesting (I still read 3 newspapers a day) and decide that someone I know would benefit from reading it, too (and who most likely doesn’t read a newspaper every day). So I’ll go to the newspaper’s website to find the URL for the story and at least 30% of the time, the search results will not return the story that I am looking for (and I always take the time to type in the exact headline of the story from the newspaper that day). I then usually search on Google by typing in the newspaper name and the headline, and the first result is invariably the story that I am looking for.

It happened again yesterday with a story in the WSJ about applicant tracking systems. The story I read (here) was entitled “Resume Overload” and the search results on WSJ came back as follows:

Google’s search results returned the following results:

The story I was looking for was the FIRST search result.

The New York Times is no better. I recently searched on their site, again using the exact headline from the story I was looking for, and got the following results:

How the NYT’s and WSJ’s search functionality on their own sites can be so awful as to not return a decent search result is beyond me, but it’s further proof (as if anyone needed more) that the newspapers are completely ill-equipped to climb the hill online that they need to climb in order to have any chance of competing. It’s all the more laughable in light of the recent flap that all the newspaper moguls (Rupert Murdoch included) are making about shutting their content off from Google. Were Rupert Murdoch and Dean Singleton to make good on their threats, not only would their site traffic plummet, but no one would ever be able to find anything to read on their site given their horrendous search functionality. If it wasn’t so annoying, it would be comical how pathetic the search functionality is on newspaper websites.