Cheezhead

Over the past few months I’ve received a number of emails from readers who have been curious about the recent changes at Jobkabob, including why traffic took a sudden nosedive around June of this year.

According to Compete, the site was receiving a steady flow of about 200-225,000 monthly visitors when that number plunged to zero in four short months.

Normally such a dramatic decline might have gone unnoticed since the popularity of recruitment trends can wax and wane, but this particular site was once heralded by many as one of the most innovative and revolutionary job search tools available.

Sourcing guru Shally Steckerl was forthright in his praise for the site’s unique matching technology and job distribution service.

In a blog post from 2007, written after Jobkabob began offering free postings, Steckerl said, “I’ve been keeping a keen eye on this company for a couple of years. In fact, I even told a few friends about it while the site was still in its infancy and exploring how to best serve our industry. Free job postings don’t turn my head, but what does is that with one single post JobKabob distributed to Google Base, SimplyHired, Indeed, America’s Job Bank, Jobster, TheLadders and several other sites. They then collect a detailed profile on candidates who express interested in your jobs, and they keep track of your candidates all for free.”

Jobkabob was created by Warren Bare, an entrepreneur celebrated by his peers as an online recruitment pioneer who launched Headhunter.net and later sold the company to CareerBuilder for a cool $200 million back in 2001.

After a brief respite, Bare founded Jobkabob in 2005 and began marketing the site as an employment search engine that based its search results on real job requirements and qualifications rather than just keywords, something he said no one else in the industry was practicing at the time.

In May 2007, Jobkabob started amassing more attention when they announced a partnership with HireAbility, a provider of artificially intelligent document parsing technology. The collaboration would pair Jobkabob’s searching techniques with HireAbility’s ALEX, an application that enables candidates to upload their resume which quickly populates a detailed profile. Both companies lauded the partnership as a ground-breaking solution that would yield “an unprecedented amount of candidates.”

And it appears the model was working. In an article from Georgia Tech written later that year, Bare said Jobkabob had 11,000 recruiters posting 29,000 active jobs and more than 90,000 profiles posted by job seekers. Bare also projected a revenue in excess of over $50 million in the next four years.

“We have the opportunity to fundamentally change a broken industry,” Bare said. “Our goal is not to niche-ify, it’s to provide the accuracy of niche sites on a large-scale. To be successful, we have to think like a recruiter, not like a computer.”

A year later things have dramatically changed at Jobkabob, and there’s been no mention in the press as to why. Despite the success of the site’s model, Bare has decided to alter some of the site’s main functions by completely removing the resume database and job board from the site and focus entirely on job distribution, a move that was implemented back in June.

I received this response from “The Jobkabob Team” after repeated inquiries as to why the database and job board were dropped:

Without the page views from job seekers, Jobkabob’s traffic dropped significantly. Currently, we are in a transition to start new services to help job seekers and recruiters. We will keep you informed when we are ready to launch our new services.

We will create a new service for job seekers, and need to put all our resources on the new product. It may not seem reasonable for you right now, but you will be among first ones to know and to judge it when we launch it.

So what are the folks at Jobkabob cooking up? Or was the email an attempt to ward off further attention and conceal something amiss? We’ll have to wait and see, but I’m willing to bet that anything involving Bare could be a game-changer in this industry.