LinkUp Announces New Android Application For Job Seekers

Comment by Jim Rockford on January 18, 2010 at 10:02pm

Big deal. You hit "companies only" on the other aggregator sites and it's the same thing. It's about people seeing your jobs. You can have the best site in the world, but if nobody sees the openings, it's useless. Linkup is years behind the others in terms of search engine exposure and useful relationships. I almost never see them in search results on google or yahoo. Who knows either if publishers will even be interested because nobody knows what the will pay for clicks. They might be able to compete in about 4 years to the other known ones. At least for companies who pay for clicks, it should be cheap, because there won't be any clicks. Saying it's the fast growing is a little disingenuous being that anyone can say that about anything, especially since you don't say how it's being measured.

Comment by TobyDayton on January 20, 2010 at 12:08pm

Jim,

Thanks for taking some time to post a few comments about LinkUp. In response, I'd like to offer a few thoughts of my own.

First of all, LinkUp is a job search engine, not an aggregator site such as Indeed and Simplyhired. They are not at all 'the same thing.' A search engine is a site that actively scours the web for its content, indexing sites and continuously updating the content that the search engine delivers in its search results. In LinkUp's case, this means that we are actively indexing jobs that are found exclusively on company websites. LinkUp only delivers job listings in our search results from the 20,000+ company websites in our search engine. As a result, the jobs are always current and often unadvertised anywhere else on the web.

More importantly, LinkUp's job listings do not include any jobs that are pulled from other job boards. As is widely known throughout the job search and HR industry, traditional pay-to-post Job boards are horrendously polluted with fake listings, job scams, phishing jobs, work-at-home scams, and other garbage listings. Sites like Indeed and Simplyhired that primarily aggregate listings from these antiquated job boards are doing little more than amassing a gigantic database of garbage job board listings, with the added problem of duplicate listings.

For Indeed and Simplyhired, it is, exactly as you say, 'about people seeing your jobs.' Aggregator sites like Indeed and Simplyhired are in the business of serving their customers - Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, The Ladders, and other job boards who pay by the click for job seeker traffic that aggregators deliver to their site.

Simplyhired's customers are the job boards. Indeed's customers are the job boards. That's the aggregator business - providing clicks for job boards.

We deliver candidate traffic on a per click basis as well, but our candidates are directed to specific listings on company websites rather that other job boards. And our clicks are, in fact, cheaper than Indeed and Simplyhired and Google because we prohibit job boards from bidding up the click price. Whereas job boards are the foundation of Indeed's and Simplyhired's business model, job boards are simply not part of ours.

LinkUp's mission is to build the best job search engine on the web for job seekers and employers. This means being dedicated to delivering job seekers with the highest quality job listings and serving employers with the strongest, most compelling recruitment advertising solution available in the marketplace. On both fronts, we have been phenomenally successful.

Our traffic growth is exploding due to extremely satisfied users who are not only returning to the site often and staying there for extended periods of time, they are referring others to the site as well. Growth in unique visitors in 2009 over 2008 was 373%, total visits rose 510%, and pageviews rose 738%. That data is publicly available for anyone to look up through sites like Compete and Comscore and in no way is it 'disingenuous' for us to say that we're the fastest job search engine, nor can anyone 'say that about anything.' Transparency stands as one of the great benefits of the web.

Speaking of transparency, I'd strongly recommend that when you post comments on blogs, in niche communities such as RecruitingBlogs.com, or anywhere on the web for that matter, you refrain from doing so anonymously. I'll give you credit for a creative and slightly amusing user name, but your comments would be far more credible if you had the courage and integrity to use your real name and company. In my mind, people who post anonymously lack confidence and conviction in what they're saying.

Comment by Jim Rockford on January 23, 2010 at 12:25pm

aggregator, job board, whatever. You pull jobs from other company's / employer's web sites, just like SH and indeed, right? By your definition, I guess they are not aggegators either? Just because they throw job boards into the mix, somehow that makes them not a job board and only an aggregator? I don't think so. I guess we need a new word that you all can agree on, or you can be upfront and call yourself what you are, an aggregator. Look up the word aggregation.

SH and Indeed's customers are employers, just like you. Also for them, their customers are job boards. And by the way, you are way overestimating the amount of bad jobs and spam on SH and indeed, and like I said, you can hit "employers only". What they have going, which is very unfortunate for your long-term potential is that you are not dealing with job boards. That may sound like a good idea, but it's a mistake. With the overpopulated job board world, you need this revenue to make it.

Employers already know and are learning that the value of paying for clicks doesn't really produce. Ask a recruiter that's been doing it for a while, candidates coming from job boards are not very good 9 out of 10 times. If you doubt this, be a recruiter for 10 minutes. The candidates companies want, and that are the most valuable, are working. Find a way to tap into this efficiently and you can make a mint.

As mentioned, if nobody is going to see my jobs, than I'm not going to bother. At this point, I wouldn't waste my time trying to include my jobs in linkup, because nobody can find you guys. You barely appear anywhere on search engines and just a week ago you started working with publishers. Like I said, you're about 5 years away from competing. Also, remember companies like directemployers.com, they already tried your idea, so it's nothing new, and where are they now? Maybe I'll see if their domain name is for sale.

Thanks for offending my name, by the way.

Comment by Jim Rockford on January 23, 2010 at 12:36pm

One last thought. Job seekers are a transient group with very little loyalty. Even if they are loyal for a couple of visits, there shelf-life is minimal. You're not building a paying customer for life. You desperately need the search engines for traffic, since you're honorably not working with those evil job boards. Right now, I don't see it.

Regarding your glorious numbers, still dis-ingeniousness. I can start a job board in about 1 day. I can go from 5 visitors to 10 in a week. Wow, I just accomplished a 500% growth rate! I'm huge! You should have been in the thousands not the hundreds to try and impress.

Comment by Jim Rockford on January 23, 2010 at 12:41pm

SORRY, ONE LAST COMMENT.

Your linkedin profile says... "The company also owns and operates LinkUp.com, a site that aggregates and publishes only jobs listed on ..."

hmmm, guess you haven't decided for sure if you are or are not an aggregator, or do you just use whatever is convenient at the moment? Which is it going to be? Best to decide early on.

Comment by Jim Rockford on January 23, 2010 at 12:47pm

don't change that linkedin profile... we'll all know you did.

Comment by Schek on March 17, 2010 at 5:55pm

NetFortuna has launched customizable iPhone and Android application for Job Search. To keep up with the growing demand and fast faced recruitment process, many of the Job Boards have already started using Mobile Applications to reach the Job Seekers. These applications are not only increasing the usability but also increasing the brand value in the competitive market.

NetFortuna comes with exclusive offer of Job Search Application for Recruters. We provide you fully featured iPhone application and Android application with very competitive price.

Try the web page http://netfortuna.com/iphonejobsearch.php for more information.

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