Yahoo! HotJobs has dumped its date-order results when seeking employment in favor of a Web search-like algorithm. We covered it a few months ago. In addition to it being a regular news item, we thought it made sense to call up Yahoo!’s Kevin Krim and find out more.
Most notably, we wanted to find out how the company planned on fighting search engine spam. Similar to Web search, providing job search results via algorithm is bound to bring out old spam tactics such as invisible text, keyword stuffing and the like, which vertical search engines have a hard time fighting. In fact, a recent finding on Job Boarders.com proves spam will be an issue for any job site giving results by relevancy.
Here’s Krim on how HotJobs is fighting search engine spam:
To HotJobs’ credit, they have implemented a human-policing element to their job descriptions, similar to Craigslist’s strategy. Here’s what the spam report image looks like on HotJobs when reporting a bad posting:
Also notable is HotJobs’ desire to help employers better optimize their own job descriptions for the best possible results, which takes on new importance after finding out from out talk that only one-in-40 job postings get clicked. To that end, the company has created a must-read document for all employers entitled “R.E.A.L. Playbook.” It can be found for free at cheezhead.com/hojobs-seo-tips.
Here, Krim explains best practices for optimizing your job postings:
It was an enlightening chat, especially considering what’s going on with Yahoo! and Microsoft at the moment. Through whatever inner turmoil is going on in Mountain View, and aside from the fact that the rest of the Big Three is trying to get as big as possible in a global land-grab, HotJobs is seemingly doing its best simply to be better.
It may fundamentally be a marathon they cannot win, considering the falling cost of job postings across most niches, but I have to give them credit for fighting the good fight.
To hear the entire 30-minute interview, subscribe to our iTunes channel.
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May 9th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Thanks for the find and info Cheez. SEO has played a huge part in our clients’ response over the last few months. It is also allowing for our postings to get better relevance across outside job boards who we send feeds to. It has been vital to our growth and client relationships.
Knowing that Yahoo is willing to show people what is working and what isn’t effective is a great step for employers to find more qualified candidates for their positions.