In a press release this week, Hound.com founder A. Harrison Barnes shows off his cute-and-cuddly side:
Barnes believes that virtually every other job board is composed of ’spam-jobs and wants to eliminate spam from the job-search process … Most jobs out there are on employer websites, said Barnes. They are not on Monster, CareerBuilder, or other sites. Most employers do not advertise their jobs effectively. Moreover, most job boards are mainly composed for recruiter jobs, and recruiters are acting as conduits for employers.
He also loathes advertising:
Hound accepts no advertising and does no advertising. The site aims to be the ‘purest job board in the world by putting the job seeker’s interests first.’ I do not want any advertising right now. We’re turning it away. Our site is neutral. The only thing I care about is the users and ensuring they get the most relevant search results. We’re not even requiring registration. Lots of lives are going to be changed by this search engine, and the only thing I want to do is stand back and let it do its job, said Barnes.
You go Mr. Barnes!
This guy sounds different, genuine … ticked-off. Too bad his “do no advertising” comment sorta rings hollow when you come across their ads on Google.
Popularity: 7% [?]
July 18th, 2007 at 9:10 am
That’s funny, I was just doing my daily blog reading and came across this from recruiting.com.
http://jobmatchbox.com/2007/07/18/which-is-worse-job-board-ads-on-job-board-spam/
Had you seen that, or did this guy just randomly get called out by two people on the same day?
July 18th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Hadn’t seen it. According to Google, mine came out about 5 hrs. before his: http://blogsearch.google.com. Plus, looks like he references my post (no backlink though) when saying “As another blogger pointed out …”
July 18th, 2007 at 9:46 am
One other note, on an unrelated topic, your RSS feed isn’t coming in properly for me. I’m using Safari v3.02 and every post has an excerpt, and then starts over again. From there on, the posts run into each other without titles. I have no idea why this is happening, but I’ve been noticing it for a while and meaning to let you know.
I just looked and saw that when I clicked the RSS button in my address bar, it took me to the Atom feed, which I then bookmarked. If I go to the RSS2 feed, everything is fine. Don’t know if the problem is on my end or yours, but hadn’t seen anything like it before, and I thought you might like to know.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Thanks. Pretty sure it’s on my end. We’re looking into it. Seems to work fine on some readers, not on others.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I find this somewhat amusing.
Hound is an appropriate name as they have been hounding (spidering) GetTheJob (maybe others) for job content for months and now they drop a press release announcing their novel approach? C’mon!
Most if not all businesses are started by a certain catalyst from observing other businesses and that’s fine, but a pure copy with a different “save the world” spin is bogus. I think we can all see through this one. I wonder where they got their term papers in college.
Joel, look over your shoulder, is that the Yankees?
July 18th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
How deep are this guy’s pockets? I’m not sure a business model that “puts jobseekers first” by accepting no revenue from anyone is going to be around for that long. A free job board can by definition only be free temporarily.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
And as for their, we only use recruiter websites claim…my first search for CPA, New York, NY yielded postings from careerbuilder and monster…
July 18th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
And as for their, we only use recruiter websites claim…my first search for CPA, New York, NY yielded postings from careerbuilder and monster…
July 19th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
heh, they get our jobs from jobcentral. Well, shit, it’s almost a mirror of our entire job content. Good for them. And how does an RSS feed work in some readers and not in others? I thought the whole purpose of RSS was one feed, many readers, all work. Are you implementing custom namespaced tags? What version of RSS are you publishing?
July 19th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
weak sight.. did a search on my town and the results came back with Salem Oregon, Winston-Salem NC, Salem NJ, etc.. not very effective use of my time. How do they expect to draw candidate traffic without advertising? Good to them.
July 22nd, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I’m sure it’s just the Internet making me cynical, but how long does anything think that this guy is going to be doing a job board (which will cost more money the more of this PR stuff he does and the more traffic he gets) as a philanthropy?
I don’t know about other Bloggers / Blog readers, but I say (as, apparently, does Joel – *ahem*) bring on the ads! If a job board can just get rid of the JobSPAM (”Start your own insurance agency!”, “Become a truck driver!”), “Business Opportunities” (”Benefits company is hiring (as long as you invest and expect no pay…”), and fake “pad my inventory” recruiter jobs (come on, you know someone in your office who does this), that would be enough to stand head-and-shoulders above the crowd.
Dan
August 1st, 2007 at 7:30 am
I just got this testimonial-style spam on my forum:
“I came across the site called resumeapple (d0t) com. The name may sound funny but it has everything what u r lookin for like resume writing services, resume writing tips and other useful information. Try it and let us know how u liked it?
www (d0t) resumeapple (d0t) com”
(Broke the links to they don’t get the benefit of PR)
IP address: 75.126.83.232. Host name: sflayer15.hound.com.
Whois: Domain Name………. resumeapple.com
Creation Date…….. 2007-02-13
Registration Date…. 2007-02-13
Expiry Date………. 2015-02-13
Organisation Name…. Attorney Resume
Organisation Address. 3914 Seaton Place
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. Las Vegas
Organisation Address. 89121
Organisation Address. Nevada
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
Admin Name……….. Andrew H Barnes
Admin Address…….. 175 South Lake Ave
Admin Address…….. Suite 200
Admin Address…….. Pasadena
Admin Address…….. 91101
Admin Address…….. CA
Admin Address…….. UNITED STATES
Admin Email………. *******@bcgsearch.com
Admin Phone………. 2431800
Admin Fax…………
Andrew H Barnes, A. Harrison Barnes – it’s still spam, and it’s NOT cute, cuddly, genuine or different.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I got a spam from this guy advertising hound as well. The funny part was the spam message was bragging about how the site doesnt spam anyone!
This guy’s into a lot of unscrupulous activity yet he seems to be getting away with it…
January 30th, 2009 at 11:19 am
A. Harrison Barnes, King of Internet Scammers
Professional have become the latest target of internet scammers. One particularly egregious spammer, A. Harrison Barnes is a lawyer, and one of the largest internet scammers targeting professionals. Here is how it works:
Barnes and his co-conspirator Colleen Trapp, have set up numerous websites where they list job openings. Some of these sites are pay sites, some are free. None of these jobs actually exist, but the job description is written broadly enough to entice an applicant to apply. When an applicant submits his resume to the website, his e-mail contact information is kept and he shortly begins to receive e-mails from his “affilates” to join a pay site. To aid in the enticement, phony jobs are posted on the paysite, which usually allow you to view the job description, but gives you no information about the firm seeking to hire. After you have paid your montly fee to the website, you are able to further browse jobs and apply through the affiliate site for the job posting. The trick is: your resume never gets to an employer. No job existed. In fact, all the jobs listed on Barnes’ sites are written by Barnes or Colleen Trapp.
Barnes, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School has never actually practiced law. His income consists entirely of proceeds from the many website scams and other rackets. He is currently under investigation by the feds. He spends his days blogging and publishing internet articles in an effort to pass himself off as a professional in the staffing industry, but he is far from legitimate. A close look at Barnes’ writings finds numerous plagerisms, and layers of fictitious corporate names to conceal the fact that he has self-published most of his writings and has not been accepted by mainstream professionals in the Job Search industry.
A. Harrison Barnes runs all of his companies out of a small office in California. He uses the address of 175 Lake Ave. for all of his busisses, but never pays taxes on any of them. He has also been linked to business filings with the Nevada Secretary of State. The California and Nevada Secretarys of State lists at least 100 business that Barnes has started since 2000 most for which he has never claimed any taxable income.
Barnes has at least three co-conspirators in his operation. I was not certain that they knew the entire operation was a scam, so I told at least two of his comrades personally and explained it in detail. Their denials affirmed my suspicion that they had prior knowlege of the operation of the scam.
Here are some of the fake companies started by A. Harrison Barnes. If you run into a staffing firm, and are not sure about it’s legitimacy, post the name on this blog and I will check them out for you.
Law Firm Staff
BCG Attorney Search
Law Crossing
JD2B
Judged
Juriscape
Law School Loan Report
Law School Loan
Legal Authority
Legal Authority Financial
March 19th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Joel,
Someone just forwarded me this piece of trash comment on your site. I cannot believe you are publishing this stuff … It would be humorous if the person who was writing it was not so sick.
They are also wrong.
LawCrossing, for example, is one of the best known websites in the legal community. It has been on the Inc. 500 twice. A significant portion of American attorneys are members of the site. The idea that these sites are scams and do not work is ludicrous.
Hound has received numerous public recognitions from major national publications and EmploymentCrossing is also a very well known and effective site. These are good sites with good people working in them.
BCG Attorney Search is among the best known and most effective attorney search firms in the United States. Its recruiters are asked to speak at conferences on an ongoing basis and are among the top figures in this industry. Here is one of them being interviewed on CNN this week http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/living/2009/03/17/am.carroll.changing.jobs.cnn
Providing a forum and approving comments that are untrue does not seem like it is something that really ads a lot of credibility to what you are doing. I am not sure why it is relevant where I went to school, for example. I run job sites and help people get jobs.
I am unsure how relevant any of this is to the fact that our company has several hundred employees and owns a lot of real estate. We have numerous offices around the country. Why does any of this matter though? I am not under investigation by “the feds” for anything. Not in mainstream media? Our sites get traffic from millions of people per month–we are the media.
We are not perfect. We have made mistakes and I have as well. One of the biggest mistakes has been people I have hired in the past and then fired. This particular former employee you are allowing to air their grievances is someone we hear from from time time time. In fact, we have a lawsuit going against them right now …
We provide an excellent service to people and are passionate about the work we do and have been for a long time. In fact, I firmly believe we provide a job search service that exceeds anything out there. We are also very good at what we do.
I think you run a great site, Joel and enjoy reading it from time to time.
–Harrison
June 19th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
We just implemented a firewall rule to block hound.com from posting jobs to our site. They were in violation of our terms of service for posting jobs in rapid fire succession. Over 50 in 30 minutes.
We allow job posters to post jobs for free. Each job in turn is broadcast on our twitter feed. When we attempted to contact Hound, they were clueless. The person I spoke to told me they were using an automated method, which is complete BS as we use a captcha control on our posting form.
We do not allow spam or any get rich quick, work at home scam postings. I found your site by searching for hound.com Google auto suggested the scam word for me. BTW nice site. Look forward to talking to you more after our next software revision. It will be HUGE in terms of capability. HR meet social media and automated candidate mathching :-)
Mike
CEO jobshouts.com
September 8th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Hound.com is easy to get on but hard to get off. They offer a seven day free trial but you cannot cancel on a weekend as you can only cancel by phone and their hours are Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, PST. I had difficulty searching the site on how to end the free trial. When I finally found the information it was on a Saturday and is could not call till the next business day. When I got hold of a support person they said too bad and that I would be billed for a month. I did not find anything on this site that I could not find on the free job sites. I would not recommend this site to anyone.