Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

This came in from Dave McClure, marketing director at SimplyHired (nice guy, by the way):

i’m still a bit skeptical tho joel — how does .jobs help employers
more than a www.company.com/jobs subdirectory, or an RSS feed of their
job listings?

i guess it helps discoverability a bit (and it might make our
efforts at SimplyHired.com easier), but if it’s just a domain suffix
i’m not convinced there’s much benefit there for the average employer.

if there’s more to it than that, i’d like to hear it…?

At the risk of sounding like a bad infomercial, Yes, Dave, there’s more! With a dot-jobs domain, employers get … !

But seriously, here’s my major point on how the existence of dot-jobs could greatly benefit direct employers and change the landscape of online recruitment:

Search engines love relevancy. They hate spam. A reality when searching for jobs on Google, Yahoo!, etc. is that spam is running wild … in addition to the engines, I think job seekers (and employers) hate it, which is a big reason why vertical search engines for jobs, like SimplyHired, are taking off.

One way search engines look to make results relevant is the site domain. For example, .edu and .gov carry tremendous weight in Google, because Google is pretty sure that the results aren’t going to be spam, which they never are from my experience.

So, if Google looks at the .jobs domain and says, Hey, these are real companies with real jobs, with little to no spam or abuse, then dot-jobs is a winner and has some incredible benefits to a direct employer.

Here’s an example: Do a search on Google for Ohio jobs. The No. 1 result, a .gov, is the Ohio Dept. of Job and Family Services. Job sites like No. 2 CareerBoard, my former employer, have an incredibly difficult time competing.

And considering the fact that the government site’s homepage 1) doesn’t even include the exact phrase "Ohio jobs," and 2) backlinks to the site with the exact anchor text "Ohio jobs" is almost nonexistent, you start getting an idea of the power the .gov URL has.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know what the various search engines will do in light of the dot-jobs domain.

However, I am confident in dot-jobs’ commitment to keep the domain pure with real employers, and policing spam effectively. And if the engines believe the information for job searches they serve will be more relevant if it’s coming from a .jobs URL and implement greater weight to it as a result, then there’s your benefit.

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