The world of job aggregation got a bit more interesting recently after blogger John Sumser of Electronic Recruiting News ripped Simply Hired and other aggregators for what he alleges is, at best, bad manners, and possibly even copyright infringement. John uses an analogy of a company coming to mow your lawn but doing a questionable job and requiring you to take very specific steps to keep them off your lawn. He notes specifically that the process is “opt-out” rather than opt-in and that at no point does the homeowner in the analogy have complete control over his own lawn. John states that this is little different from the job aggregators collecting jobs from corporate sites and “legitimate” job boards and displaying them as their own to create their business model and revenue stream.

And John wants to make a conversation out of what he’s calling “jobjacking”, which means the issue may not go away anytime for soon for the likes of Simply Hired, Indeed and Jobster, among others. Add to that the fact that Craig’s List has recently sent cease and desist letters to the major job aggregators to ensure that they no longer spider Craig’s List job content and the picture looks a bit more bleak still. As Mr. Sumser says:

Let’s start talking about why the new crop of job aggregators feel that it’s okay to purloin the copyrighted material of others without their permission. While we’ve chosen Simply Hired as a target, the same onerous BS is a part of the operating materials of each of their competitors. As we see it, it’s vandalism.

As a former owner of a search engine marketing company familiar with that industry, I would compare Simply Hired, Indeed, et al directly to Google. In short, they collect information in the form of web pages, RSS feeds and various other documents, create filters and a search mechanism for the user, and display results that include some additional bells and whistles. They are, at their very core, vertical search engines. John also likens this new breed of job board to the big search engines, but has a different take.

Copying the poor taste of large search engines, these jobjackers take without permission claiming that an opt-out policy is the same as ‘permission marketing’.

I appreciate John’s argument, and I love that this is a part of the conversation within this little section of the blogosphere. Ultimately, however, I think that his view may be a bit off base, if not in theory, then definitely in practice. John’s lament will likely be the equivalent of shouting into the wind - Google is obviously here to stay and the job aggregators seem to have enough traction that they will become a mainstay as well. Job seekers looking to simplify their job search no doubt love the “all in one” approach that the aggregators allow, as well as some of the features that the aggregators present. Generally, they tend to be a bit more on the cutting edge than the Monsters of the world and are still small enough as companies to make quick adjustments to users’ suggestions. Despite that, the shear breadth of job search results is astounding because until the aggregators came along the market was very fragmented.

As for Craig’s List, as I understand it, the snafu has resulted from the job aggregators ignoring the robots.txt file used by the Craig’s List site. The robots.txt file, for those unfamiliar with it, is used by any web site to direct the various spiders to content and to indicate which content should be crawled and which is off limits. Whether intentional or not, it is unlikely that the aggregators will now continue to spider Craig’s List content. What they will likely do, however, is to make sure that from a technological standpoint their spidering software/program is equipped with failsafe interpretation of the robots.txt file.

Regarding the job aggregators, I remember being truly amazed at the concept when I first discovered it with Indeed and then again when I saw and explored the Simply Hired site. I was a bit new to XML at that time, but it was clear to me that its very simplicity was what made it a powerful format for this type of site. The point was further driven home when I came to understand that Indeed both populated its database directly from feeds and also allowed others to view their search results as a feed – basically, Indeed as an application is XML in and XML out, with a database and user-friendly interface in between

I’m sure that this issue will be discussed ad nauseum in the days to come, but ultimately I think that little will come of it other than the specific steps I mentioned that the aggregators will likely take.

Tags: blogosphere, craigs list, Indeed.com, job aggregators, jobjacking, jobster, john sumser, rss, simply hired

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