Job Aggregator Sites: Legal? Effective?
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Written By Reprise Media | March 29, 2005 | Share This
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Vertical search engines for job listings are big news right now, what with the launches of Oodle.com, SimplyHired.com, and WorkZoo.com, not to mention Indeed.com’s move out of beta.
Some question the legality of sites that make a living by capturing and reposting the listings of others, saying it’s in violation of copyright laws. Paul Forster, the […]
Vertical search engines for job listings are big news right now, what with the launches of Oodle.com, SimplyHired.com, and WorkZoo.com, not to mention Indeed.com’s move out of beta.
Some question the legality of sites that make a living by capturing and reposting the listings of others, saying it’s in violation of copyright laws. Paul Forster, the co-founder of Indeed.com, doesn’t seem to think so, and for right now the law agrees. Things may get stickier when Indeed starts selling sponsored links, but they’ve yet to set a date.
Legal issues aside, just how useful are job aggregators to job seekers? There’s no question they can be a valuable tool. But sites like Monster and HotJobs have advanced features that some of these newer engines don’t have, including the ability to automatically create a log of applications & cover letters sent, store various versions of your resume, etc. This can be really helpful when you’re applying to scores of jobs and trying to keep track of what you sent and to whom (though then again, so can Excel - the tool I used for my last job search).
There’s also the issue of whether they are broad enough in scope, brought up in this post by a technical recruiter at Microsoft. She worries whether these sites are actually able to capture all of the available listings, particularly those on the careers section of corporate sites:
…I should also warn serious job seekers about relying solely on a site that monitors only “job boards, newspaper sites and niche sites.” What you miss are corporate careers sites, and that’s where companies list most of their jobs. Why pay a job board or newspaper to host your job descriptions when you can host most of them yourself?
She brings up Indeed’s failure to capture all of the jobs on the Microsoft site though she does say admit that the firm is covering some of the listings. But this recruiter says that some is not all:
…Use whatever service you prefer to learn more about the different types of employers or the types of positions available in your area, but once you ID your companies of choice, don’t forget to visit and set up agents on those corporate careers sites. If you rely on job board aggregators or even job boards alone, you may miss some of the best positions.
This is a great point, and could be extended to any type of search. If your search is really critical, you’ve got to determine your top target results and allocate a greater proportion of your more manual efforts towards seeking them out. The ‘human touch’ can be hard to replace.
Topics: Search: Vertical |
Gretchen Ledgard at Microsoft tried out Indeed soon after we had started including jobs from Microsoft’s website, so at that point we hadn’t got comprehensive coverage of jobs from Microsoft’s website. We posted a comment about this on her blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2005/03/08/389875.aspx#390120
For technical candidates the challenge is depth and breadth. Most technical people prfere to use newsgroups for thier leads and with good reason. Newsgroups are free and very verticalized. Newsgroups are the webs version of the “classified” section of newspapers - quick and cheap. Job boards are the “careers section” of the newspaper, colorful and costly. Job seekers of course will view both. Recruiters prefer to post to newsgroups.
At Fetchster.com, a Minnesota Job Search Engine, we spider primary sources - the companies themselves. We certainly don’t make the claim that we get all the available jobs in Minnesota, but we do capture a great majority of the jobs that aren’t in the secondary channels.
VJSE is a young market - it’s going to take some time for job seekers to let us know what they prefer, and even then there might not be a clear winner!
Adam Gedde
http://www.fetchster.com
aggregators while helpful - cast a wide net
niche sites that are industry and job specific will continue to proliferate to meet seeker needs to the fullest - rather than the broad smatterings of postings you see now without the detailed information job seekers like to see
I came across this new Vertical Job Search Engine Today. JobGeni http://www.jobgeni.com - Runs on Google AJAX Feed API and gets realtime data from several major jobsites like indeed, simplyhired, yahoo hotjobs, monster and jobster at once.