I do not think it is a Business killer though.

It will change the Job Search market and new companies will grow and prosper. We have been signing up new companies daily that are willing to grow with us and accept a little less on the features side if they can save money especially on temporaries and contractors.

Change is Good!

#1. we caught them grabbing over 5 gigs of data. guess what – now they’re not welcome anymore.

Here’s the relevant command for others who may feel abused:

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 209.73.161.21 -j DROP

#2. nobody ever developed a viable job board by stealing (”aggregating”) jobs from others. – the jobs by the time you get them are old and out of data, and they’re copyrighted anyway.

as if they couldn’t learn from their, and others, past mistakes.

Last year were guys at yahoo who demonstrated you automatic metadata extraction from any html page in the same class and you blow them away… well now I think they will blow you back.

(from http://vrypan.net/log/archives/2005/07/11/yahoo-hotjobs-crawling/ )

However there is a bit of an ostrich-like approach in hoping that that sales force is ever going to be maximally effective. In fact, if that sales force is less and less effective over time as more jobs are posted exclusively on company websites or on Craigslist, then HotJobs is just going to lose market share as *users* figure out what is going on and look elsewhere. And a smaller market share will lead to fewer sales, right?

We’ve seen the same thing time and time again — services that once cost money are now being done for free. (Craigslist is only one example, of course.) And the successful companies are those that realize that things change over time and roll with those punches. Because, on the Internet, if you don’t do it then someone else will, whether you like it or not.

That said — Yahoo can win big here (as can Indeed or Simply Hired, etc.) by adjusting faster and doing exactly what you say — getting the “right” response out of all the garbage. (Do I think that is easy? No, of course not. If it was, I wouldn’t have a job. Where, by the way, we are hiring…)

Cheers,

-DeWitt

-David Lim

I was the head of BizDev and Corp. Development at HotJobs in 2000 – 2002.

Yahoo had a free job listings product that aggregated jobs from all over the web. Elizabeth Blair was running it.

Those of us from HotJobs tried to point out, over and over again, that what recruiters are looking for is not MORE and UNFILTERED response, it’s the *right* response. And free listings just dont get you there. (The exception being jobs that are in the bottom half of pay, status, and advancement; the low quality of those jobs will naturally tend to discourage over-eager applicants).

Yahoo! was selling us on the idea of being the featured listing provider and have our listings appear, for a hefty annual fee, at the top of the rankings. We demurred, but Headhunter didnt and it drove them into a rush sale job (to CareerBuilder!) here’s the wayback URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20010604072348/http://careers.yahoo.com/

The new configuration is the old configuration.

It didn’t work for Yahoo! then (psssst, that’s why you guys bought us for $436 mm, remember?). And it’s not going to work now.

I feel bad for the HotJobs salesforce because it won’t take long for recruiters to wonder “why the heck am I paying for listings when I can them for free?”

This is a tremendous step back for the organization, I wish they’d sought the input of us old HotJobs partisans! We hate seeing our beloved HOTJ in a weak, and declining, #3 position!

what happens when another well known company (say Google for example) comes along and creates the exact same service without all the internal infrastructure and internal listings?