Rest In Peace (.jobs)
Posted by JasonIn April 2005, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) board of directors approved a new top-level domain - .jobs.
EmployMedia, sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), had hoped to get corporate attention by creating a space devoted to posting and recruiting for job opportunities (i.e., Microsoft.jobs or IBM.jobs). The experts and re-sellers lined up.
Tom Embrescia, chairman of .jobs, said “Once established, .jobs will do three things to make the current recruiting process better,”"It’ll make the recruitment process simpler for companies to recruit; it’ll make recruiting uniform for all companies; and that means that job seekers will find the jobs faster, and companies will be able to more quickly fill open positions.”
Fast forward 3 years to the Spring of 2008, at a Recruiting Conference. .jobs participated in the vendor exhibit hall - touting candidates don’t want to take the time to find a companies career page. Here is how busy the booth was…
Fast forward 15 months to today. While one might think yourcampany.jobs might be easy for job seekers to remember, it is not mainstream and doesn’t hold much value. There are many reasons for the lack of adoption, here are 10:
- Job seekers typically don’t search for jobs by a companies name, most have turned to a search engine and perform a location + function + jobs /careers search.
- The upside the “experts” talked about for using .jobs domain name over a .com/careers domain never really came true. There is no need for an organization to brand .jobs when it is more valuable and just as easy to brand a .com extension on their existing site.
- .jobs was touted by the “experts” as the next best thing. It might have been popular in the recruiting world for awhile, but candidates never found out about it, and that’s what matters the most.
- Just having a .jobs name does not help with SEO in anyway.
- For most companies, their jobs are still hidden behind Applicant Tracking Systems firewalls
- .jobs was over-regulated, and very limited.
- Employers alone can’t socialize a trend like this on their own - therefore the candidate world didn’t (and won’t) adopt it as a way to search.
- By not giving out the .jobs domain to job boards, etc (which drives new industry adoption) – they severely limited the exposure of the domain by the segment of the industry that would have paid the most money to brand the domain type.
- The .jobs launch was lost in all of the noise with other extensions.
- Job seekers don’t need more confusion added to an already cumbersome process.
The “experts” were wrong, their predictions never came true. It didn’t make the recruiting process better for candidates. It didn’t make the process easier for companies to recruit. And, it didn’t allow candidates to find jobs more quickly - enabling companies to fill their positions faster!
And, while there were a few success stories with .jobs, it does hold some value if used for more than a page or site re-director, albeit limited and not worth the investment given where we are at today with job seeker behaviors and recruiting technology.
My thoughts… R.I.P. .jobs!
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August 3rd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I would take issue with point number four and I believe you will see job central.com demonstrate the value soon when they develop the generic .jobs names in partnership with employ media…
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Jason reply on August 3rd, 2009 7:33 pm:
Eric, thanks for stopping by and the comment.
I am more than happy to watch and report a follow-up within 12-24 months to see what specific value this brings for either job seekers or employers. I think the main point we all need to consider is this isn’t mainstream for job seekers, and a .jobs domain vs. a .com domain does very little for their job search process. It’s more buzz for Recruiters, and just another “trend” to buy into. I hope I’m wrong, and look forward to measuring the tangible results.
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August 4th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
No to .jobs, I say keep it simple stick with http://www.jobs.co.uk all UK employers can advertise their vacancies for free and the volume and diversity of roles ensure higher natural search engine listings than they could achieve themselves; even those with an ATS that hides their jobs.
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August 5th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Eric is right. Although there’s not a ton of SEO value for the .jobs domains, there is some. If you had accounting.jobs, the exact match domain name would definitely be a benefit. I think that accountingjobs.com would be better, but that’s speculation on my part.
Also, point #1 is false. Many job seekers search for jobs by company name. MANY. Maybe not the majority, but it’s a lot of people.
The other points seem pretty good to me, though.
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Jason reply on August 6th, 2009 12:27 am:
Willy, thanks for the comments. The issue with the accounting.jobs example is due to the regulation in place a company could purchase their name + .jobs, and not a keyword like accounting.
I too agree that some job seekers search by company name, yet the point was the .jobs domain in itself in this example would add little value if used the way most have used it.
Thanks again!
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Willy reply on August 7th, 2009 9:57 pm:
Ok, forget accounting.job.
IBM.jobs has a lot of SEO value for the search “IBM jobs.” The problem is that IBM.com has so much PageRank, that it will still probably outrank IBM.jobs for that query. SO the marginal value is nearly negligible.
The whole idea was pretty stupid from the start. If you’re a company, you should be using .com 99% of the time. That’s not going to change no matter how many new extensions come out.
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August 5th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I completely agree with this post. From the very start I was suspect of the extreme hype about the .jobs initiative. As a volunteer leader of a SHRM affiliate (Director of the state council in NJ), I was among the folks encouraged to embrace and promote .jobs.
It simply did not ring solid to me as a value add. Really, how hard is it to go to a company’s careers section on its web site? And even as some companies adopted the practice, it would become confusing to applicants as there’s no “directory” showing which companies have a .jobs domain. How many times can a person type in http://www.futureemployer.jobs, only to find there is no such site?
So, job seekers still flocked to the job aggregators who, at the time of the peak .jobs hype, told me that .jobs would not be helpful in populating their sites with jobs collected from all over the web. Has that changed? I don’t know, but even if it has, does it make the process vastly easier and more effective (enough to justify the hype), or is it just different? Seems to me the aggregators are doing just fine.
Unless .jobs gets simultaneously implemented across the job search landscape, AND a vastly more effective way to use the .jobs domain is devised, we will indeed be attending its funeral.
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Jason reply on August 6th, 2009 12:28 am:
Rich, thanks for reading the post, and adding your comments. I couldn’t agree more, and it’s interesting to hear about the position you were in and the hype.
Jason
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August 5th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Just one point of order, if you do not mind, to the conversation. .JOBS is a Top Level Domain (or TLD) of the Internet. Like .COM is a TLD and .GOV is a TLD. TLD’s are part of the Internet architecture. Unless the Internet dies too, I am sorry to say there can not be a funeral for you to attend. Now, I may not be around in 50 years, but if the Internet is stll around, then .JOBS will still be around. Web sites come and go but TLD’s remain an Internet constant, a design aspect that users can rely upon - without having to think about it.
If you want to use the concept of “dead” as a metaphor, you may now please continue the conversation and sorry for the brief interruption
Ray Fassett
founder
.JOBS
1-216-426-1500 Ext 3
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Jason reply on August 6th, 2009 12:30 am:
Hi Ray, thanks for the comments. I couldn’t agree with you more about a TLD - or the internet for that matter. If I had to speculate about the mention of a funeral, I would guess it is in reference to the overall adoption in the industry, along with the tangible business results on a broad scale - specifically the results that were promised in the beginning.
Jason
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Willy reply on August 7th, 2009 10:03 pm:
What if Tuvalu sinks? There may be a funeral for .tv… probably not, but who knows?
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August 10th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Hey Jason,
interesting to me is to think about the deep motivation for why .jobs was thought to be necessary in the first place. To me its symptomatic of what I still think is the biggest issue for most companies when it comes to effective recruiting. Recruiting is seen as a cost center. As a result of that fundamental assumption, recruiting is separate from marketing, separate from the products that the company produces, separate from the initiative or programs it creates, separate from any other function that is seen as either a profit center or driving a profit center.
The reasons recruiting as cost center are in some cases obvious and probably subject enough for a series of blog posts. I think its misguided and short-sighted. I’m not just talking about how the accounting department categorizes it, I’m talking about the internal assumptions and external attitudes toward “recruiting” from most executives and leaders. (Despite slick mission statements about “people powered” or similar.)
As it relates to the .jobs phenomenon, the existence of .jobs is an extension of this idea that somehow a company needs not only a separate site, but a separate top-level domain to talk about their jobs. This has always felt goofy to me from the start. Willy got it right in his IBM example. IBM’s .com pagerank will always outrank its .jobs pagerank. So why do they need separate ones? Sounds like more of a distraction than anything.
Isn’t it likely that the visitors to their .com sites would also likely fall into a category of people they’d want to connect with their opportunity content? The segmentation of customer/candidate happens in the mind of the customer/candidate, not in the hands of the company.
More to come…
Jason - lunch. Been way too long in coming. Are you going to be in town for more than a couple days in the near future?
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August 13th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Hi - I think if we re-calibrate our expectations of what .jobs was anticipated to accomplish and instead just look at some small wins — e.g. companies who need to list a url in contained space - whether it be a radio ad, visible on a banner, trade pubs, collateral, etc. - using a employer.jobs domain will reduce the click count for the jobseekers. I consider that a small win for the jobseeker and employer Clearly if space was not an issue, you could list your employer.com/careers instead.
Also the industry is abuzz with a .jobs initiative that is on the horizon by an online job board founder so we may all be rethinking .jobs soon enough.
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