Welcome to online recruitment’s future, boys and girls … Yahoo!’s HotJobs is quickly becoming a vertical job search engine.
You’ll notice results from a local Cleveland, Ohio job site called CareerBoard. If you click on the job, it takes you to CareerBoard’s site, framed by HotJobs.
HotJobs refers to the non-HotJobs listings as Job Results from the Web. Clever spin, huh?
They even seem to be aggregating jobs from corporate career sites: Click here and note the listings from CSWG.com.
I can’t find evidence on a widespread basis, so this new offering may be in beta, but I’m sure it’ll spread quickly.
If there was ever any question that the big search engines (Yahoo!, Google, MSN) were getting into the vertical search game for jobs, this is undeniable proof.
Wonder how HotJobs’ clients will feel about this? What’s Google going to do now? Will they aggregate Monster and CareerBuilder listings? How will smaller players like Indeed and SimplyHired react?
If you’re in the northern hemisphere, summertime is a great time for roller coasters, and no better time for an online recruitment thrill ride. Woohoo!
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July 5th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
Joel – great post, Yahoo has been spidering careers Web sites for a while with a special user agent called CafeKelsa. It appeared to be a special project for HotJobs, and now you’ve uncovered how the job data is going to be used. Good stuff.
July 5th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
hmm… “curiouser & curiouser” said alice.
somewhat notable they’ve chosen to preference their own paid listings positionally above other listings; not necessarily the most relevant ordering from a jobseeker’s perspective. along those lines, not clear how easy it will be to keep the paid listings biz model and do vertical search effectively at the same time. as with Yahoo Travel vs FareChase, seems like they haven’t quite made up their mind which business they’re in (yet anyway).
still, certainly validates the vertical search model we & others have been pioneering. i guess they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery ;)
- dave mcclure
http://www.simplyhired.com
July 5th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
I’ve been watching some of the “vertical search” ideas float around and I have been pondering some questions on the legality of it. Is absorbing postings like this legal? Read more about it -
http://www.technicaldisaster.com
~Barry
July 5th, 2005 at 11:14 pm
summarizing & indexing content, and then referring user traffic back to the content source is a fairly standard model these days, based on the same approach that Yahoo, Google, and other majors have pioneered.
in at least that sense, there isn’t much difference between “vertical” search and regular search.
the ongoing litigation between Google and Agence France Press notwithstanding, for the most part this is territory that has already been well covered by the majors — see excellent summary by Danny Sullivan (SearchEngineWatch) here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050525-093716
July 6th, 2005 at 10:11 am
While similiar indexing of services has been accepted- the base business model is fundamentally different here. Google Library is not scanning Amazon’s books or a large Publishing house and then directly competing for the same customer.
Yahoo jobs is looking to make a profit directly from the jobs service. The banner ad campaign (the window stating you’ve left the site, but to please let the employer know you found the job through HotJobs) is a direct attempt to pull a paying customer away from the originating site.
Good faith rulings are based off of the idealogy that an entity is not trying to profit from copyrighted work. In the case of Yahoo jobs that appears not to be the case.
The online jobs market and the revenue generated from such postings is directly related to online services (posting and advertising). This business practice seems to be directly competitive, rather than a good faith scenario.
July 6th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
i see your point w/ respect to Yahoo; not sure what their take on the subject is.
however, in general we (SimplyHired.com) and other vertical search sites send traffic back to the source, and our business models don’t compete directly with folks we index.
July 6th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
In my opinion, its been a long time coming that the major search engines start to move into the job market.
I do genuinely believe that we should look at this from a job-seekers perspective – if they can find one place where all the jobs are together (with the link taking them directly to the source job) then why should they go anywhere else? Specially if those jobs are only direct from employers websites (rather than the approach of other job boards)
Now obviously I have biased interest in this, having been one of the co-founders of worldwidejobs.com a couple of years ago, but I do believe that the market is now ready for the next generation of job searching
Stu
http://www.worldwidejobs.com
July 7th, 2005 at 9:37 am
New to this discussion. How does this type of single source solution increase the quality of the results for the job seeker? Monster and the other national boards have long attempted to provide better results by claiming to offer more local jobs. If Hotjobs is simply going to provide even more job postings that a job seeker has to sift through, how is that more desirable? Also, as the owner of a recruiting firm, I hear from job seekers that these sites have outdated postings. How do they intent to manage the job postings and make sure that the results are “fresh”?
July 7th, 2005 at 1:46 pm
also…
if i’m trying to offer ‘job’ postings on my job site, to drive advertising, do i get to split with yahoo, the revenue that yahoo derives from their advertisers who advertise on the pages that my job postings are displayed??
why wouldn’t i complain if yahoo where to essentially use my job postings, and slap my job postings in a frame on the yahoo site with yahoo advertising.. i’d be losing revenue from my advertising!!
-bruce
bedouglas@earthlink.net
July 10th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
A search engine that already takes care of searching for jobs. http://www.indeed.com
They get their revenue from google ads, and companies haven’t complained about them yet. I don’t see how it’s a problem either.
October 26th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
It’s so special to see the ebbs and flows online as the internet reacts to ea. others movements; much like a chess game that sometimes gets out of hand and your opponent chucks the whole game up in the air! No one else comes close to googs leverage capabilities so it’s just a matter of time when the counter punch comes and it should knock out the competition or at least leave them punch drunk. lol
Cheers,
Brin