Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Take a look and see if your job board(s) of choice are hijacking your employment brand with their Overture or Google pay-per-click campaigns.

Here’s a sample search on Yahoo!: Click here for "Microsoft jobs" results.

You’ll see that all the sponsor/paid results (the ones shaded in blue and off to the right) for "Microsoft jobs" are job boards – CareerBuilder and Dice in particular.

Granted, the CareerBuilder listings are in fact Microsoft jobs (Dice’s aren’t), but think about it: Microsoft is paying CareerBuilder so CareerBuilder can pay Yahoo! to get people to Microsoft jobs.

(Yahoo! owns CareerBuilder’s competitor HotJobs, and both Yahoo! and MSN get paid from Overture listings on Yahoo! and MSN, to make it even a little more confusing.)

It’s all just a little stupid in my opinion. Microsoft should run their own pay-per-click campaigns to get candidates to their own jobs – not pay CareerBuilder to send users to CareerBuilder and Microsoft’s competition.

And it’s not just Microsoft. Employment brand "theft" is rampant. Do searches for yourself and see if a job board is diluting your employment brand. If they’re using your trademark in the text ad, you can make them stop. If you’re a customer of the job site doing it, well, then they  "have some ’splainin’ to do."

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