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.
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.