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 Alison, in a reply comment, correctly points out that LinkUp’s job search engine contains no duplicate or outdated job listings because LinkUp only indexes jobs from company websites.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 Equally as problematic, the job feeds that Indeed and Simplyhired accept also contain old, outdated jobs that have already been filled, and even worse, garbage jobs that include work-at-home scams, phishing jobs, scam jobs, and listings from headhunters,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

Despite the continuing rise in U.S. unemployment and the mixed signals from the August jobs report (good news relative to previous months but still horrendous compared to historic norms), there are a lot of companies with jobs listed on their company websites (still the 2nd best place to find a job behind a personal contact). Below are the top 100 companies with the most job listings on their company website in LinkUp’s job search engine during August. (LinkUp indexes jobs that are only found on company websites. As a result, the jobs are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake).

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.

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.

Despite what will undoubtedly be more bad news when the April jobs numbers are released, there are a lot of companies with jobs listed on their company websites (still the 2nd best place to find a job behind a personal contact). Below are the top 100 companies with the most job listings on their company website in LinkUp’s job search engine. (LinkUp indexes jobs that are only found on company websites. As a result, the jobs are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake).

In addition to reporting the volume of job listings by state and by industry each month on LinkUp.com, we’ve also started looking at the top 75 job titles from our job search engine. Below are the top 75 job titles found on LinkUp in April. (The list is EXACT job titles so there may be multiple titles for certain positions – for example, Registered Nurse is listed as #1, RN is #18, and Staff RN is #75).

LinkUp, one of the leading job search engines in the country, indexes job listings found on only on company web sites (16,874 company sites in April). Unlike other job search engines such as Indeed or Simplyhired, LinkUp does not aggregate jobs from other job boards but rather aggregates and publishes only jobs pulled directly from company web sites themselves. As a result, job listings found on LinkUp are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

Starting this month, we will be running a monthly report of the top 50 job titles found on LinkUp during the previous month. The report lists EXACT job titles, so you will see things like Registered Nurse as the top job title for March, with RN (the exact same position) listed as #5. We will not be grouping job titles in any way and the list will be exactly as job descriptions are listed on the company web sites that LinkUp indexes in its search engine.

LinkUp, one of the leading job search engines in the U.S., indexes job listings (415,445 job listings as of today) found on only on company web sites (19,623 company sites as of today). Unlike other job search engines such as Indeed or Simplyhired, LinkUp does not aggregate jobs from other job boards but rather aggregates and publishes only jobs pulled directly from company web sites themselves. Because we only index jobs from a single source (the company’s website itself), there are no duplicate listings, no work-at-home scams, no old jobs that have already been filled, no 3rd-party intermediary postings, no risk of identity theft, and lots and lots of jobs that are not found anywhere else on the web. As we say on the site, job listings found on LinkUp are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

(By the way, a phlebotomist is a person trained to draw blood).

LinkUp’s job listing report for February showed that nearly every single industry tracked by the job search engine experienced a decline in new and total job listings for the month. Similar to the state by state data, 32 of the 37 industries reported a decline in new job listings with all new listings by industry declining by 14% from January. In terms of total job listings by industry, the overall decline was 11% with 31 of 37 industries showing a decline during the month.

LinkUp, one of the leading job search engines in the country, aggregates and publishes only job listings found on company web sites (14,190 company sites in February). Unlike other job search engines such as Indeed or Simplyhired, LinkUp does not aggregate jobs from other job boards but rather indexes only jobs pulled directly from company web sites themselves. As a result, job listings found on LinkUp are always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

Of the handful of industries that saw an increase in job listings during the month, Consulting & Freelance, Restaurant & Food Service, and Retail experienced the largest increase in job listings in terms of both quantity and percentage. The industries that suffered the largest declines in percentage terms included Aerospace, Defense, & Aviation, Marketing, and Automotive. The industries with the largest declines in the quantity of job listings included Heath & Medical, technology, and Sales & Business Development.