welcome to the party guys -- glad you could join us ;)

the new job search interface is nice, although the relevancy of the current ordering for 'featured' vs 'organic' listings is perhaps a little questionable.

wondering how you folks plan to be viable in the paid listings business *and* do meta-search at the same time?

if you really believe you "shouldn't ever have to use more than one job search engine", do you also plan to index listings from Monster and CareerBuilder?

in any case, congrats on the new offering & best of luck,

- dave mcclure
www.simplyhired.com

Sweet. Now I know where to start looking when they find out how much time I spend reading Yahoo Search Blog.

Seriously, though -- great idea, and good work.

that has got to be an eventual biz model killer

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?

Wow! What goes around comes around!

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!

Sounds like a wonderful idea. Job hunting can probably be alot easier. Instead of going from search engine to search engine to look for jobs, job hunting can be much easier and stress free. I look forward to it.

-David Lim

indeed.com -- one search, ALL jobs ;)

Marc -- I think you make a good point about cannibalizing one's own market and this making it difficult for the HotJob's sales force.

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

How about going the other way round? What if we had a microformat for CVs and Yahoo! crawled the net, gathered this info and presented it iin search results? "I'm looking for a web developer with 5+ experience, good knowledge of..."

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

you have so little number of sites that you crawl, please do not tell me you maintain bots?

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.

This is an idiotic move on Yahoo's part.

#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.

So Far I think its great!
Not only does it change the way people look for jobs but the niche boards are getting much greater exposure. We started TemporarEase.com a few months ago and the vertical search engines allow us to offer greater exposure to our clients and compete with the bigger boards. It also helps our clients to limit their advertising costs substantially.

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!

What format is required for Yahoo to scrape jobs off of a corporate site?