Online employment sites are a disgrace. I know a little about this business, because I built one of the earliest sites: Mercury Center’s Talent Scout.
This is the area of the greatest threat (and opportunity) for newspapers.
This is a market in flux, and cursory review of the any of the biggest job sites reveals they have not changed significantly since 1996. These sites are still far too hard to use and to customize, the job application process is flawed and there is little feeback, their databases are dirty and there is no connection to employers’ own internal or external databases, it’s too hard to get properly-formatted resumes to employers, the sites don’t learn from users’ searches and return too many irrelevant results, no one is using XML and RSS syndication to move information between job seekers and employers — and that’s just off the top of my head.
It’s hard to believe this is the biggest-money segment of online advertising.
Monster and Yahoo’s HotJobs are extemely vulnerable to new competition. But the newspapers’ own blessed partner — Careerbuilder — is out of the race, with half the market share of the number two Hot Jobs