One job board owner has dubbed a recent marketing effort by Jobfox as “sleazy as hell.” Here’s what went down:
Every job site I know of has an online application process. This isn’t news. Job seekers click on Apply Here and submit their resume. For competing sites, however, this option opens the door to get in front of prospective clients. So, instead of a resume, Jobfox was sending the following message to employers via their competition:
We’d like to send you up to 50 highly matched candidates at no cost in order to show why Jobfox.com is one of the fastest growing job sites on the Internet.
Simply post your Certified Nursing Assistant job on Jobfox.com with no obligation and you’ll have access to up to 50 qualified candidates interested in positions like yours-normally a $349 value.
Founded by Careerbuilder founder and former CEO Rob McGovern, Jobfox attracts millions of highly qualified, employed candidates who aren’t finding your jobs on traditional job boards. Only Jobfox uses intelligent, skills based matching and candidate confidentiality to get your jobs in front of the most qualified candidates, while simultaneously sending only the most qualified candidates to you. More than 1,000 employers have turned to Jobfox.com to save up to 75% of the time spent on reviewing resumes while reducing cost per hire and time to hire by 50%.
The only cost is a few minutes of your time.
LINKS EXCLUDED
Thanks!
NAME EXCLUDED
Jobfox.com
Obviously not the most honorable – or effective – means of marketing one’s services. Throw in the fact we’re talking about a job site founded and run by people with a certain level of respect and industry experience, and the action seems almost surreal.
The culprit? Jobfox PR guy Barry Lawrence made the following statement:
Jobfox hired a third-party vendor to help us extend free trial offers to employers, as a way to introduce our services. During a two-week period, the third-party vendor responded to a few postings on other job boards. We instructed the vendor to stop this practice once we became aware of it.
We certainly understand why our competitors would not want Jobfox promotions on their job boards and we are re-doubling efforts and communications with all of our third-party vendors to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.
Granted, it’s pretty easy to blame such things on “third-party vendors” and alleviate the pain of having to point a finger at yourself. Being a Washington-based company, Jobfox knows all about spin and passing the buck to others.
That said, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (although I may be the only one). As far as I can tell, there’s no track record of such guerrilla marketing tactics by the company. A repeat offense, however, will not see such forgiveness.
Of course, for Jobfox, their reputation is forever tarnished with at least one job board no matter what happens, not to mention everyone a seriously bitter CEO comes into contact with for a long time to come. I’ve heard people tell an average of seven others after having a bad brand experience.
This mistake will surely cost Jobfox more than the average.
Popularity: 35% [?]
June 10th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I had to reread this a couple times to understand what jobFox actually did – might want to rephrase this “So, instead of a resume, Jobfox was sending the following message to employers via their competition:”
maybe:
So, instead of a resume, Jobfox was using the ‘apply now’ button to send the following message to employers (via their competition):
that is remarkably aggressive and makes me wonder if the mean streak in careerbuilder’s DNA doesn’t come from Rob.
I will say however that I have seen a lot of job boards go out of business – good and aggressive marketing is a matter of survival for anyone launching a job board.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
The marketing better work, someone needs to pay for Robbie McGovern’s jet and hair transplant….Pompous and arrogant are qualities that he will never shake…Lets hear your spin on this one Barry Lawrence, wait, let me take my Dramamine before you start typing….
US Airs
June 10th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Cheese,
This WAS NOT an isolated incident, it was a coordinated effort, that had to be known throughout the JobFox organization. Notice the From email address is an actual JobFox email address. Therefore one can only assume that someone high-up had know that an email address was going to be created for a marketing campaign that involved a third party.
Additionally, the campaign was actually outsourced to an India Data entry team, as identified by the Source IP Address of the “job candidate”, and the time of the email— 3:46am EDT
The campaign included creating bogus emails, spidering job boards for email addresses (which is probably illegal anyways), and spamming email addresses, which is actually illegal due to CANSPAM.
Here is an actual email that we received from one of our clients.
************************************************
From: “Kim Anderson”
Date: May 27, 2008 2:42:04 PM EDT
To: ***A GOJobs.com Client”
Subject: GOJobs/Geebo.com:03TrnsDTX.2 – Civil Engineer, Transportation
Reply-To: “Kim Anderson”
Title: Civil Engineer, Transportation
Job Code: 03TrnsDTX.2
Company: *** A GO Jobs Client ***
Delivered to: *** A GO Jobs Client ***
———-
From: Kim Anderson
Email: kanderson08@jobfox.com
———- Resume ———-
We’d like to send you up to 50 highly matched candidates at no
cost in order to show why Jobfox.com is one of the fastest
growing job sites on the Internet.
Simply post your Civil Engineer job on Jobfox.com with no
obligation and you’ll have access to up to 50 qualified
candidates interested in positions like yours-normally a $349 value.
Founded by Careerbuilder founder and former CEO Rob McGovern,
Jobfox attracts millions of highly qualified, employed candidates
who aren’t finding your jobs on traditional job boards. Only
Jobfox uses intelligent, skills based matching and candidate
confidentiality to get your jobs in front of the most qualified
candidates, while simultaneously sending only the most qualified
candidates to you. More than 1,000 employers have turned to
Jobfox.com to save up to 75% of the time spent on reviewing
resumes while reducing cost per hire and time to hire by 50%.
The only cost is a few minutes of your time.
Go to
http://www.jobfox.com/web/employer/payforpost/payforpostjobposting.aspx?PCd=FOXPRO1
to post your job for free now!
Go to http://www.jobfox.com/Site/WhoWeAre.aspx to learn more
about Jobfox.
Thanks!
Kim Anderson
Jobfox.com
———- Tracking Information ———-
Remote_Host: 202.144.57.98
User_Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Date/Time: 5/27/2008 3:46:21 AM
************************
I guess they aren’t as smart as a Dr. Seuss…
“Fox in socks,
our game us done, sir.
Thank you for
a lot of fun, sir.!”
June 10th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
It’s debatable whether sending that solicitation is legal or ethical. Someone that places their email in an employment ad is asking for responses and knows full well that they can get a response from anyone that sees the ad. Today we all know job ads get sent all over the place. If a real person from jobfox had found that employers specific ad and knew they had viable job seekers for that posted position and then they MANUALLY sent the employer an email, would that be spam? I don’t think it would be spam at all. So if they automate the process, is that spam? Does automation make it spam? Why? I don’t think so and frankly how do you even know it was automated? Maybe someone typed it to look like a form so it seemed credible. We just don’t know.
I am not for or against it because I see both sides. I think a job board owner is going to be 100X more angry then the posting employer. Many job posters actually welcome this; we are all selling exposure right? “My network is so big” – “your ad will be seen 4 billion times. The poster just wants to fill the position and few posters are loyal to any one employment platform. If we as job board owners don’t like people spidering our customer’s email addresses then we should change our system.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Hey there Rafael,
The interesting and most disturbing was the fact that “Kim” fill out an “Application” for the position.
Now I don’t know about JobFox, but if I was trying to tell employers that my software is going to save them a bunch of time, and help them recruit more qualified candidates, I certainly would NOT be sending Advertisements into the clients ATS system.
That shows a complete lack of respect for the recruiters, and shows that as a company you don’t value their time at all, since they now have to sit there and delete your AD from theri ATS.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Maybe someone can help me. I have no idea what they did wrong. If someone sends a marketing piece soliciting services to a target market such as “Job Postings” Where is the harm? If I send an email to a car ad on Craigslist asking them to advertise on my auto site wheres the harm in doing that. Am I missing something?
Mike
June 12th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Mike, good question.
To intentionally solicit employers from a job seeker profile/account (as an applicant) is against the T&C of many sites — the solicitation is misrepresented as a letgit application from a job seeker.
June 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I COMMEND JOEL FOR COVERING THIS. WHAT HE DOESN’T MENTION AND NONE OF THE COMMENTERS MENTION IS THIS — WHAT ABOUT THE JOB-SEEKER WHO HIT THE “SUBMIT RESUME BUTTON?” WHAT ABOUT THE LITTLE GUY? AS A JOB-SEEKER I HAVE BEEN DUPED NUMEROUSE TIMES BY JOBFOX – THINKING THAT A COMPANY WAS VIEWING MY RESUME!! STAY AWAY FROM THAT JOB BOARD….(IF YOU WANT TO GET A JOB)
June 25th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
To Anyone Who Reads This:
Hello, my name is Judy Tuck and after 14 years of working for my company, the Gallup Organization. My Executive-Research Department was downsized (which I fell victim to) and all I am interested in right now, no matter what it takes, is a JOB…
I appreciate your “BAD-NEWS/REVIEWS” site, but I am more interested right now to find a JOB! I have excellent credentials dealing with survey research and customer service.
So, if you can help someone like me find a JOB I would be very grateful.
For that matter, why don’t you channel your energies into creating a positive job site and I will be happy to be your first listed “Jobseeker.”
Thank you,
Judy Tuck
email:JEFFREYATUCK@aol.com
September 16th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Hello
I am looking for employemnt and wondered why jobfox charges unemployed people like me money for ability to send our resume throug their site?
Is it moral ? As far as I know normal recruitement companies having some standards charge employers for their services.
They tempt you into registering with their site posting job ads( for example on indeed) and then when you click on the ” apply” button they direct you to their site. You think you can just register and apply but you find out later you can not untill you pay them money.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Not only is it a terrible site that’s convoluted and difficult to navigate, I couldn’t find an email to their customer service until I went to another web site to read all their reports about jobfox(surprisingly, all 47 were bad. They got some of my money for their premium membership and I’m sorry to say I paid them big bucks to write my resume and they did a terrible job on it, It was worthless. The resolution process is also terrible and I never got my money back. Unemployed and paying people for poor work. Whats equally as bad is that if you fill out a profile on their site and then find a job advertisement you want to apply for, click it and the job is listed on jobfox, jobfox won’t let you apply unless you pay for the premium membership. Total scam and total ripoff. The worst of the internet