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 Alison, in a reply comment, correctly points out that LinkUp’s job search engine contains no duplicate or outdated job listings because LinkUp only indexes jobs from company websites.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 Equally as problematic, the job feeds that Indeed and Simplyhired accept also contain old, outdated jobs that have already been filled, and even worse, garbage jobs that include work-at-home scams, phishing jobs, scam jobs, and listings from headhunters,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

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.

Last week, we released the jobs report for October from LinkUp.com which showed that both new jobs and total jobs on the site rose by roughly 300,000 from September. (LinkUp aggregates and publishes jobs pulled directly from nearly 10,000 company web sites). Given the fact that the jobs are real and current (updated daily) and contain no duplicates (since they are pulled from a single source – the hiring company itself), we felt that the data was pretty reliable. But in light of the current economic meltdown and the nation’s rising unemployment, the magnitude of the increase from September was not only counterintuitive, it was, frankly, unbelievable. So we dug a little deeper into what might be inflating the numbers.

After some excellent sleuthing work by our team, we discovered that a relatively small number of companies (.4%) are assigning new unique URLs every day to all of the jobs they post on their own site. Our guess is that this allows the jobs to be ‘refreshed’ daily on other aggregating sites like Indeed and SimplyHired so that they appear higher in the search results. Our system for tracking new and unique jobs on LinkUp is tied to the unique URL for that specific job, so the new daily URLs that these companies assign to their jobs, even if it was on the site the day before, were counted in our system as brand new jobs. We hadn’t noticed this before because we deliver search results according to the quality of the match rather than by date of the post. We do this because all of the jobs on LinkUp are, by default, current, open, and available and we take them down immediately when the hiring company that posted the job on its own site removes that listing from its company site. So the ‘new daily URL, auto-refresh’ technique that distorts search results on SimplyHired and Indeed has no impact on LinkUp. This creates a better service for Job seekers using LinkUp, but clearly has an impact on our monthly report about the number of job listings by state and by industry. It also impacts others as well (see related points here and especially here).

By our estimate, the October report, for example, was inflated by 420,931 jobs. (Of course, September and all prior months were inflated by some large number as well for the same reason). The 38 companies we flagged for reassigning new URLs to their jobs each day posted a total of 40,430 actual unique jobs to their corporate sites during the month. But because of the fact that they constantly assigned new URLs to those openings, our systems counted that pool of jobs as 461,361 new and unique jobs. Needless to say, we’re both chagrined by the findings and pleased to have identified the culprit. And the fact remains that LinkUp published almost 1 million real jobs from real companies in a single, convenient site with the best search results of any job board on the web today.

LinkUp, arguably the best national jobs site on the web today, has released a widget that allows any blogger (or any site for that matter) to publish jobs on their blog or web site. The widget is available here, and can be customized to publish only those jobs that the hosting site wants to publish (i.e., marketing jobs in San Francisco). (scroll down on this blog to see what the widget looks like…). Customization is achieved by selecting from any of the following criteria: key word, location, specific company name(s), and category or vertical industry. LinkUp also allows people to set the pixel dimensions of the widget through sliding bars for widget height and width (one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen for making widgets). Once the customization aspects have been set, code is generated for that specific widget to copy into the blog or web site. It couldn’t be any easier.

Eventually, we will begin paying affiliate sites a share of the click revenue that they generate on the job listings that employers are running paid-search campaigns on. And while I would certainly not pretend that the widget is going to provide anyone with a massive flow of cash, we hope that affiliate sites benefit from delivering a stream of very specialized, high-quality job listings that match the exact content of their blog or site.

For a limited time, I will send a free DVD of the movie Sweet Land to anyone that publishes the widget on their site. Just send me an email at diggings@jobdig.com once you have the widget loaded onto your site with the details of where I can send the DVD.

About LinkUp…

LinkUp’s mission is really quite simple – to build the largest, highest-quality, most searchable, relevant, and user-friendly database of jobs anywhere on the web. We do this by aggregating job listings that employers post on their own corporate web site. These job listings, pulled from roughly 10,000 U.S. companies, are often not advertised anywhere else on the web or in print and do not include any duplicate job listings. LinkUp does not publish any job listings from 3rd party intermediaries such as staffing companies, search firms, or headhunters and we’ve very intentionally kept the site free from annoying advertising.

Perhaps most importantly, the jobs are always current because they are removed from LinkUp whenever the employer removes them from their own corporate web site. LinkUp does not allow people to publish jobs directly on the site itself so there is absolutely no risk of identity theft and there are no work-at-home scams like you’d find on many job boards around the web today. Because the listings are often two-pages in length, with excellent information to search on, the search results users get from LinkUp are absolutely unparalleled. And finally, there are a ton of innovative features (tabbed browsing, for example) that allow LinkUp to deliver a highly unique, extremely user-friendly experience. It is, simply, the best national job board on the web today.

With the announcement that JobDig is launching its next market in Indianapolis on August 4th, I came across Indianacareerconnect, a job board operated by the state of Indiana. I have been tracking Minnesota’s job board, Minnesotaworks.net, for years and I have been continually baffled as to why states feel the need to offer this service to jobseekers and employers in their states. Bafflement would turn the frustration and anger if any of these state operated, publicly funded job boards actually attracted any traffic or offered a viable alternative to the for-profit boards that offer job listings on the web, but luckily they do not. In this case, I am quite happy to report yet another example of government incompetence.

But why do states feel the need to be in this business? Most state boards I’ve seen do not charge for their listings, so they are not generating any revenue. In fact, they are simply undercutting and competing against the for-profit sites and publishers in their state that could be generating additional tax revenue and job growth. The states are not filling a need that isn’t already being met by other free and paid listing sites around the web. And they certainly are not improving on the service that those other service providers are delivering. No state operated, publicly funded job board I’ve seen offers anything unique in the way that they attempt to help employers and jobseekers. On the contrary, most state operated, publicly funded job boards are pretty mediocre, run-of-the-mill type sites and many are a complete disaster.

The obvious conclusion is that these state operated, publicly funded job boards are the result of a bunch of feckless politicians and clueless government bureaucrats who think that operating these sites is actually a good use of taxpayer dollars. I have been told that Minnesota is investing $20 million into its job board – a complete and utter waste of money. This boondoggle is especially atrocious when one considers all the things the state should be doing that it currently isn’t. And once a government program is created and funded, entrenched bureaucrats will see to it that it’s never eliminated or shrunk, no matter how ineffective or counter-productive it might be.

The other likely, more cynical possibility is that state operated, publicly funded job boards offer politicians and bureaucrats something tangible to point to when asked what they are doing to create jobs and help local businesses in their states. Of course, pointing to these boards is a complete joke, but that’s never stopped a politician’s propensity to spin, especially around something as challenging as creating jobs and building a healthy, supportive environment for business.

My recommendation for Minnesota (which applies to other states as well) is to cut the investment in their state operated, publicly financed job board by $15 million and either return the money to taxpayers, or reallocate it to something that is actually going to generate a positive ROI for the state and its citizens. With the remaining $5 million, the state should evaluate and partner with a handful of talented, intelligent, knowledgeable stakeholders in the space from the private sector. Iideally, these partners would be located in the state and would include both for-profit companies and non-profit organizations who work in the jobs and job training space. A thoughtful collaboration among qualified players in the space and a prudent investment of $5 million in those companies and organizations would, without question, result in a better, more comprehensive solution, a unique offering, or at least unique aspects integrated into the overall solution(s),and a service that would truly help jobseekers and employers alike.