Jobfox is asking job seekers to pony up for another new feature called a Personal Job Market Explorer. After reading into it a bit more, it sounds a lot like what free job search engines Simply Hired and Indeed do, except this one will cost you.
Jobfox CEO Rob McGovern sent out an email to users that said this about the Personal Job Market Explorer, which purports to scour over 1400 job sites to find the most relevant opportunities:
We give your Jobfox profile job to our research team and they review jobs from other job sites (big and small) to find only the most relevant jobs for you. The team then organizes these jobs and sends you reports three times a week.
Jobfox user Linda said she signed up for the trial period to gauge the results. This is what she found:
The new “Job Market Explorer” really isn’t anything that job seekers haven’t seen. It’s based on key-word searches which Jobfox touted itself as somewhat of a joke when it was being marketing by the Jobfox team. Out of over 1,400 jobsites scoured only 57 jobs were found. It is based on “smart rules” but that method is never really defined. When I hit the link for a specific job (this one on America’s Job Exchange), the job had been deleted from the board. My experience is a senior position and Jobfox must have searched very generically because another job match was for a junior position from college.com. Also, from the list I got there were no “lesser known” job sites.
Perhaps Jobfox is trying to remove itself from the matching game. There are no matches to these jobs on their 5-star rating system. Why would a seeker want to pay for a service that already exists on the web and then charge them by claiming the service to be so unique?
Marc Drees of Recruitment Matters thinks he knows why the service was created. In a blog post, Drees said that Jobfox encourages Explorer users to come to the site three times a week to get their personalized updates, even though in the promo email Jobfox says their team conducts searches once a week.
Drees wrote (translated from Dutch), “In fact, they promote return visits to as many users as possible so they can pimp their traffic statistics.”
Popularity: unranked [?]
May 27th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
A research team who review jobs from other job sites? I hate how Jobfox is always referring to their expert teams when it’s probably just culling from all of the job boards… hmm haven’t seen that before.
@Mark Drees… pimping is the perfect word for what Jobfox is doing.
May 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
jf is aimlessly scrambling in every direction, feel sorry for them
May 27th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Very interesting about Jobfox. Just a few years ago, when Rob McGovern was asked about Craigslist he said: “think that five years from now we’re all going to look back and say that the idea–call it a “dumb classified”–is dead”. Now he is pulling jobs from Craigslist in this new feature as well as Monster and Careerbuilder.
The fact that Jobfox is going into this direction AT ALL is because their matching technology simply does not work. Now, in order for them to get money out of candidates, they have to do the same thing as Indeed and Simply Hired? It seems sort of bizarre to me that the Jobfox team would even consider this sort of scheme especially given how different they make themselves out to be – and how badly Rob McGovern trashed other sites when he introduced Jobfox.
How many more gimmicks are they going to add to the Advantage program to make seekers think it’s worth it? Probably never. Maybe they should have followed the “dumb classified” route.
May 28th, 2009 at 6:39 am
I tried the free-trial. It was worse than worthless. If I wanted to auto-scrape Craigslist and YahooJobs for low-rent jobs, I could use any number of free services.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:12 am
If JobFox went through a substantial layoff in Feb and they aren’t back-filling other positions where people have left the company, then please tell me who these research experts are? Seems to me that they are throwing stuff out there to see what sticks – matching, resume pal (which I’m still not sure what it does) and now this.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Experts? Come on!
Just say what it is. There are multiple platforms out there that can do this with no human interaction. Don’t tell the few candidates you have left that you have experts doing real work. Unless the few employees who are left are doing it.
This is like Google saying that there is a huge call center that does the work once you plug in your key words.
I guess Rob (John Conner) McGovern does not want skynet to take over!
FYI Rob – craigslist is still here and there are multiple classified sites who are doing very well and growing. Can you say Kijiji, Oodle, Craigslist, etc…etc…
Just close the doors already.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I hope the people who sign up for this at least get a free lunch at Maggiano’s out of the deal.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
DO NOT spend any money on this! The entire concept is a scam. If there are so called “experts” working on this, Jobfox needs to fire them. I have never seen such a cluster***k of crap in my life. The supposed company vs recruiter job reports is a joke. None of the direct employers are actually direct at all. They are all recruiting companies – and many of the jobs give the link for 2-3 different job boards where the job is posted. I think that even the greenest job seeker would find that to have the same job posted on several boards is a bad thing. I wouldn’t spend a dime using the service when I could go to other sites for free. Jobfox needs to decide what they are doing. Looks like they are going to abandon the matching. Trying to be the next Indeed/Simply Hired at a price is the wrong way to go.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am
What about hound? And is indeed the best for mid to senior level job seekers (higher manager, director level?
Thanks,