Improved labor market efficiencies, advocacy, shared information and simply providing more real jobs to job seekers throughout the nation are merely a few important measures of success.

Video: Explaining the National Labor Exchange (3:09)
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This is my “Jobs are FREE” attempt at comedy ;o)

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- Chad

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Being a non-profit we (DirectEmployers Association) take our knocks every now and again, regarding industry perceptions, although we generally just ignore the ignorance. Generally mind you, not always..

Lately the ignorance has been focused on our new automated SEO platform, Direct SEO. A few have questioned our SEO experience and others have questioned whether a non-profit could handle what is involved with SEO platform maintenance. Well today I’d like to try and educate the ignorant.

RE: Experience
DirectEmployers has been working with Joel Cheesman for years regarding SEO traffic strategies and in 2007 we started slowly implementing the overall strategy on the JobCentral, National Labor Exchange. We slowly rolled out locations and member company pages with great success, growing from a few thousand pages to around 25,000 or so. The very next step was to add in occupational titles which again bumped the pages indexed by Google by thousands.

Rick Wehrle joined the DirectEmployers staff and coordinated the final phase of JobCentral SEO with Cheezhead. This phase jumped JobCentral pages indexed by Google to over a million and within the next few months search engine traffic directly to JobCentral had doubled. What many don’t know is that Rick was responsible for Monster’s search engine driver, Jobs.com. Rick was also responsible for rolling out an SEO strategy so powerful Google had to dramatically change their index and organic page policy.

Back to JobCentral’s new SEO success.. Since this automated platform had proven to be successful for JobCentral we (DirectEmployers) decided to replicate the platform and provide it FREE to our member companies. This is where all of the questions and ridicule starts, imagine that..

RE: Maintenance
The platform is automated, so maintenance isn’t a factor. Initial set-up is the most time invested, other than platform UI changes and updates. One word you should focus on.. A-U-T-O-M-A-T-E-D, we’re trying to do SEO smarter not harder.

Oh and I did I mention it’s FREE to DirectEmployers members? In an economy where companies are trying to cut costs, improve efficiencies and INNOVATE.. Free works awfully well.. Am I suggesting you stop using vendor SEO platforms? No, I’m saying plug in our Direct SEO platform and start owning organic search results. Companies will have the analytics available to ensure all vendors are providing better return on investment and we’ll continue to provide new and innovative products to support that very same initiative.

UPDATE: Direct SEO is now being used and BETA tested by nearly 80 member companies. In Q4 DirectEmployers will launch out of the current BETA product and release the platform to the balance of it’s membership, which currently includes nearly 500 companies.

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Then came iPhone.. THANK GOD! But that wasn’t quite enough.. It still wasn’t my PC and even though Microsoft showed us, through the Mojave experiment, that Vista was “cool”, it just wasn’t cool enough.

Windows 7, released later this month, complete with a touch screen and BumpTop software may have users ever so close to that Minority Report feeling. And no Windows 7 doesn’t integrate with psychic orphans or allow your vehicle to move at super fast speeds vertically up buildings. Windows 7 integrates with a touch screen, which allows the BumpTop software to take your desktop to an entirely different level.

Check out the video

More on BumpTop:
- techradar article
- BumpTop blog

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How did it become a cycle based on dependency?
Dependency was inherent in the process where companies would pay to ship their candidates to a community resume database, thus using their all mighty dollar to build a vendor product, moreover providing instantaneous talent to their very own competition. The question soon became, how could a company walk away from a database they’ve built with their very own dollars? The success of the platform rode square on the shoulders of the companies who funded this community database, unfortunately these platforms did not “belong” to them.

Prices rise, people change, dependency continues.
Let me state clearly this dependency process was not set-up with a fiendish plot to take over the recruiting world, although once the big dollars started flowing, prices, attitudes, staff, and values changed quickly.

The hook is set.. Or is it?
Hiring companies starting tasting internet recruitment success and then in January of 1999 the shift began. TMP Worldwide, who owned Online Career Center (OCC) and The Monster Board (MB), decided to shut-down MB’s quickly crashing database and move the cutesy brand to a much more nimble technology in OCC. Simply put the “new” product was OCC with cartoon characters, nothing more, nothing less. Although companies started to taste the first move in this online game of recruitiing chess with a 100% price increase. Companies paid because their dependency was now too deep, furthermore the new Super-Bowl advertisers added the star power necessary to try and justify the increase.

Schooling the System
Smart hiring companies started working the system by only paying for resume database access and not paying the prices for “candidate bait” or job postings. Rather they would lie in wait while their competitors spent huge cash on postings and then feverishly mined the database.

Evolution
In 2002 the very first job search engine was created to bypass the bait and switch game. The process focused on pushing candidates directly to the company site where they would apply into that specific company private database. At this point many companies were starting to turn on their own career sites fitted with early applicant tracking systems, but they were still hooked on the game and tied to their investment in this community database model even though their main complaint were that prices had now skyrocketed 500% or more since January 99. Prices were climbing and Return on Investment (ROI) was plummeting.

Broken
Companies now understand the old model only provided a bridge until they could build their own private career sites and databases. The hard part, for most “investors”, was accepting their community database investment was always a fleeting and short-term initiative. The wool has left their eyes and the investment has been focused on driving candidates to their private databases and not paying the toll for the entire community.

Are jobs boards dead?
Is the newspaper dead? No, although a fundamental change has taken place which forces a more cost effective and value-rich opportunity for companies who are no longer dependant and are breaking away from a vicious cycle. Job boards who understand this and evolve focused on ROI, providing more value and helping companies tap into hard to find niches will stand the test of time.

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I was having dinner with a group of friends back in March and as the discussion turned away from the failing job market and toward the Broadway aspiring wait staff, who were singing their hearts out while waiting and serving, at Ellen’s Stardust Diner in Manhattan. Then out of the blue a tag-along, out-of-work, 20-something parasite nephew remarked “I would never take a job in the food industry”. You could’ve heard a pin drop as everyone at the table directed their attention to the naive remark, while I calmly mustered all of my insight and wisdom to ask “ummm why?”

Privileged Nephew’s answer was “I just told myself that I would never work in the food service industry”, translation… “I’m too good for that kind of work”… Hmmmm, well next to the spoiled brat nephew his Uncle sat in bewilderment. Why? Because his Uncle, an international lawyer and former White House staffer, used to wash dishes and perform many other tasks in his father’s diner while growing up and even while attending Law School. Now interestingly enough that same path is not good enough for his nephew who apparently had everything handed to him on a silver platter..

This story is not far away from many I have seen over the past 15, or so, years. High School and College kids “rollin” in their dad’s Mercedes without a care in the world or maybe sporting the newest iPhone 3Gs to cope with their new Twitter fix… Common parental response? “I give it to Johnny to keep track of him” Really, the (insert newest, most expensive mobile device here) is for tracking purposes ..

Is that your final answer?

We’ve become a society of privilege and abundance where certain types of work and lifestyle is “beneath” us and not worthy of our time. I believe this all started back when parents wanted to “start giving my kids a better life than I had.” I find that absurd, because that childhood of hard work, discipline and fear of not pleasing our parents made us all into what we are today.. Successful.. and we want to take that AWAY from our kids?

Do we believe spoon feeding little Johnny will make him into a better person? Or will it set him up for ultimate failure. Case in point, in top colleges across the nation today the term helicopter parent is commonly used for parents that “hover” and make all decisions for their kids throughout their time at the University. Even to the point where the parents are negotiating their kid’s salary and benefits at their very first job out of college. No, seriously this is happening and has been happening for years. Millennials are staying home longer and going to school at colleges closer to home now more than ever.

Xers wanted to get out and make a name for themselves while the millennials are trying feverishly to reattach the cord.

How can we expect a strong economy and future when we’re raising privileged weaklings?

**Note to self: Submit yourself for drama award if ranting continues.

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Answer: Land Warrior

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How did this start?
Quick history.. In 2002 iLogos Research (now Taleo Research) performed research which illustrated that less than 30% of Fortune 500 companies’ jobs were listed on the big 3 job boards. This research validated what most of the industry already knew and our Association had already acted upon. The predecessor to JobCentral, DirectEmployers Employment Search Engine, was created to index/spider 100% of the job content only from corporate career sites providing job seekers a clean path to ALL of the original jobs, not just a small chunk. This pure job content became very popular among job sites soon after DirectEmployers started providing a series of company xml feeds at no charge. The feeds were initiated to provide better content to job sites everywhere, moreover better market penetration for companies everywhere. Many job sites receiving this clean job content would then mix it with their own making it seem organic to their site (cross pollination).

The War for Content Heats Up!
The job search engine model seemed to be reinforced when Indeed and SimplyHired sprang onto the scene, and was fully validated when many new search engine-like sites, hungry for more and more job content, were soon to follow. Job boards needed to find a way to receive more content to keep job seekers returning, while exploring ways to game the young upstarts.

The War for Traffic Strives Through Duplication.
More job sites everywhere started mixing the corporate feeds with their very own content, cross pollination was happening everywhere. Job boards were also providing this mixed, now majorly duplicated content, to SimplyHired and Indeed. Why? If you provide thousands of jobs as traffic accelerators, through verticals,
you will no question receive heightened traffic results. But if you provide the cross pollinated content of hundreds of thousands of jobs your traffic could be accelerated 10 fold, or more. Why is this problematic? Duplication, moreover job seeker experience.

Where things went wrong.
Well you cannot expect everybody to play by the rules when there really weren’t any. Although you do expect site owners and designers to think about job seeker experience, and the use of content that didn’t truly belong to them. Reports of sites using interstitial ads to capture job seeker information, required registration for application, and then repackaging the exact same, now highly duplicated, content and submitting it to other job sites as their own has become an issue for job seekers, employers, and many of the verticals.

End result, it’s gotta stop.. Terms of Service to come..

Will the answer to this problem be a popular remedy? Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook, not so good“..

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