Recently we received a complaint from an angry job board owner who discovered his postings were being scraped by EmploymentCrossing.com, a job board that pulls postings from other boards and consolidates them onto their own sites - then charges job seekers an access fee.
The job board owner described how EC’s network of sites (ActuaryCrossing, MarketingCrossing, AdvertisingCrossing, etc.) are indexing thousands of normally free jobs, then submitting them to vertical job search engines like Simply Hired (wiki - search) and Indeed (wiki - tag), which in turn direct a job seeker back to one of EC’s sites, where they must pay a fee to view the entire posting.
A. Harrison Barnes, CEO of EmploymentCrossing, said there is nothing unethical about what the company is doing. “We are consolidating any posting that’s publicly available,” he said. “Many can be found by doing a simple search on Google.”
EmploymentCrossing, founded by a group of attorneys, has the goal to be able to exhibit every available job on the market. About 500 researchers comb the Internet each day looking for fresh postings and then funnel them to industry-specific sites in the network.
“We visit over 100,000 sites a day and take as many jobs as we can find, classify them, and then publish them on our site,” Barnes said. “In this way, what we’re doing is a lot more advanced than Indeed and Simply Hired.”
Job seekers pay about $29.95 a month to view the postings. Barnes said they have accumulated about 1 million jobs total, versus SimplyHired’s 6 million jobs.
Barnes is emphatic about the fact that there is no advertising involved and that companies are never charged for postings. When asked if job seekers are open to paying the fees, he said the traffic for the site has doubled every month, and that one of his sites, Lawcrossing.com, currently claims 2 percent of U.S. attorneys as users.
The ticked-off job board owner doesn’t share in Barnes’ success. ” I think what bothers me most about their practice is that they are most likely scraping sites then charging people to look at and apply for those jobs.”
For more information, check out some EmploymentCrossing videos.
Popularity: 36% [?]
July 9th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
SimplyHired does not directly index any of the sites in the EmploymentCrossing network.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
careerbuilder got its start scraping jobs from other boards as well (this might’ve been in 1999) but was kind enough to stop scraping our jobs when we requested it.
good luck getting a lawyer to stop scraping you.
as for the business model, we used to do something similar years ago. might be a cash cow for a while but it’s not the future.
Vanessa, did you watch those videos — you have no comment??
July 9th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
SimplyHired may not index the jobs from EC directly, but here’s proof that it’s done indirectly.
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/list/q-insurcrossing
also here’s a job listing
http://www.jobvertise.com/job?jobid=6435177&referer=simplyhired
July 9th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Vanessa, I never said we don’t have their jobs indirectly. Any site they post to that sends us a feed or we crawl, will send their jobs to us. If Jobvertise wants to remove these jobs they can, and then they will be removed from our site.
July 9th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
They are also spammers - recently they have registered and re-registered to spam my discussion forums about their architects board. It’s twice as annoying as usual as I have my own jobs board on the site.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Job aggregators are in a risky business because their product is not their own. If the law changes and posting any piece of another site’s IP becomes Illegal I don’t know what these guys will do. Same thing with Google, they spider other site’s content and this becomes their product. They sell sponsored listings around other site’s IP. I don’t know what to think about aggregating free content that doesnt belong to you (especially job content) then charging access from folks who I imagine are desperate for a job. Honestly, you’d have to be a complete knucklehead to pay for this service.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Only watched 45 seconds of that first video but HOLY TELEPROMPTER BATMAN!
As for the model, meh I guess it’s like good ol’ P.T. Barnum said…
July 11th, 2008 at 10:21 am
RThis reminds me of a John Sumser post way back ( http://www.interbiznet.com/ern/archives/061005.html) about Job jacking as well as a post Joel wrote. I remember it being good. something about indeed taking peoples jobs and then creating a brand new page in order to put their own ads or google ads on it and making money from it. Joel, if you can find that post, please paste it in a comment here.
August 20th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I have no idea who that woman is talking about EmploymentCrossing–that was scary! Here is a video about our site: http://www.employmentcrossing.com/lcvideomessage.php
We have well over 2,000,000 jobs-not 1,000,000 as is indicated in the posting. We also have a very aggressive system for removing duplicates and a much greater proportion of our jobs are actual employer jobs and not recruiter jobs as on other sites. Recruiting firm jobs are typically duplicates of the same jobs employers are also advertising.
It takes a tremendous about of work to scan job sites and employer pages for jobs and classify this information. This information could not be easily found by using Google–although all of the information our sites are showing is publicly available. These sites provide a tremendous benefit to users that they cannot get through traditional sites.
Th EmploymenCrossing sites are unbiased in the information they show, do not accept job advertisements and provide a service that is centered towards assisting the job seeker with real jobs they will have a difficult time finding on their own. Just because the information could be found publicly if someone had massive resources does not mean that the information itself is not extremely useful. Google’s value is categorizing and displaying public information. The fact that a job board is being attacked for this shows just how entrenched many in this industry have become to a business model that relies almost exclusively on accepting money from employers to show biased search results and not always working for the benefit of the job seeker. Our sites exist for the job seeker.
August 21st, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Ironically, Employmentcrossing.com, a site that often has talking heads extolling how great the job market is (despite mainstream news reports of otherwise) recently laid off some of its “…enthusiastic staff of 500…”, some of which were contract workers – a little tactic used by shaky companies likely to avoid paying full employment benefits in the first place. Some have been told “we hired too many of you…” Obviously, business model must not be working as well as they anticipated…shady, irresponsible stuff going on in business these days
August 30th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I signed up for a free-trial at EmploymentCrossing, and when I decided to cancel it, found that it was unreasonably difficult. I was unable to find any FAQ’s OR contact information on the site. Finally, two links deep (’My Account’ -> ‘Edit Credit Card Information’) I found a FAQ link, which said you need to CALL CUSTOMER SERVICES from 9 to 5 Pacific time to cancel… but it didn’t provide the phone number. A Google search finally turned it up (800-680-7345). C’mon guys.
If you’re not operating a shady business, and you have confidence in your quality, make it easy for people to cancel memberships. If you have 500 employees prowling job boards, have one of them take 2 hours out of their day to put appropriate links on the site… then you won’t have to pay 20 customer service representatives to answer phones.
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
sflayer15.hound.com
75.126.83.232
January 12th, 2009 at 11:13 am
“Bo:
August 30th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I signed up for a free-trial at EmploymentCrossing, and when I decided to cancel it, found that it was unreasonably difficult. I was unable to find any FAQ’s OR contact information on the site. Finally, two links deep (’My Account’ -> ‘Edit Credit Card Information’) I found a FAQ link, which said you need to CALL CUSTOMER SERVICES from 9 to 5 Pacific time to cancel… but it didn’t provide the phone number. A Google search finally turned it up (800-680-7345). C’mon guys.
If you’re not operating a shady business, and you have confidence in your quality, make it easy for people to cancel memberships. If you have 500 employees prowling job boards, have one of them take 2 hours out of their day to put appropriate links on the site… then you won’t have to pay 20 customer service representatives to answer phones.”
Have you ever seen the movie, “Liar liar” with Jim Carrey? Lawyers are taught to act, literally, to play the game and to take the side of whomever they’re defending. So, in otherwords they’re taught to be evasive and most likely not to be very forthcoming. That’s why they can charge the BIG bucks.
I tried to even find the information on what the monthly fee was and that was hidden as well. Yes, they’re lawyers, but wouldn’t it be great to have a website where consumers could rate lawyers and leave comments, kind of like a consumers advocate site?….oh, I’m sorry, the lawyer would probably sue and there goes another frivolous lawsuit!
I tried to find a lawyer a few years ago for a child custody case. I friend suggested “Christian lawyers.” Now there’s an oxymoron!
Best