I know, I know, vow to write better, post more, and then… disappear for a week. Sorry dudes.
But I wanted to draw your attention to this Washington Post piece about spider/scrape job sites. It’s an interesting idea, and the benefits to both employers and jobseekers are obvious.
Of course, Monster is going to hate sites like SimplyHired and Indeed, because it’ll no longer make sense to pay $400 to post a job on Monster.
I’m still formulating my opinion on this one. On one hand, the benefits to jobseekers and employers are obvious. And Monster’s own Terms of Use state that all user-submitted content remains the property of the user who submitted it, so it’s not as though Monster’s content is being stolen. I suppose technically it’s theft of content from the employer, but employers choose Monster to get wide exposure for their posting, so it’s hard to imagine that they’d object.
On the other hand, the sites pretty much are spidering Monster’s own database (forbidden by the TOU) essentially to undercut them. That seems shady.
I love the idea of a pay-per-click, search engine-style model for paying for job listing exposure. It seems like it’ll save all kinds of time and money for everyone except for the pay-per-posting sites they compete with. And I love the idea of competing business models- I firmly believe that the model that provides the best value for the money will succeed, even if it isn’t even the best known. I also firmly believe that businesses which do not provide good value for the money deserve to fail in the face of competition from worthier businesses. So I’m not worried about poor ol’ Monster’s success in the face of a new model for posting jobs.
I’m just not sure it’s fair to use Monster’s own system to clobber it.
UPDATE Dave McClure of SimplyHired has stopped by to clarify their use of Monster listings in the comments on this entry. I encourage you to read his remarks and consider them in your own opinion-forming. Thanks, Dave!
actually, we’re not undercutting Monster (or any of the other sites we index). we bring users back to the sites where the content originated, be it a job board, a classified site, or an employer website directly. in other words, we provide distribution & additional traffic to folks like Monster.
like Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines we do the following:
1) index a portion of site content for relevance matching
2) display that summary to users based on their keyword search
3) take users back to originating site/content if they click thru
Monster is a significant source of job seeker and employer information, and we don’t expect them to disappear anytime soon. quite to the contrary, Monster provides perhaps 10-15% of listing data in our system, and we think they provide a substantial amount of value to employers and candidates.
That said, Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs, collectively are probably only ~30-35% of the over 4 million job listings on SimplyHired.com. We index job data from over 1,000 sources (and growing), including large job boards, small job boards, classified sites, and company websites directly. Job data is a classic long tail business, and perhaps 30-50% or more of online job listings come from sites you may never heard of before.
In summary: we feel our service is a complementary offering to Monster and other large job boards, and at the same time provides job seekers with a wider view of the market than they might otherwise get from just visiting a few job portals.
that said, thanks for the post & coverage!
- dave mcclure
http://www.simplyhired.com
Their beds are so comfortable.