Maybe I Don't Like Being Jacked After All

After skewering Mr. Sumser last week for going to the dark side, I got a taste of my own medicine today. Apparently I am not as big a fan of midnight gardening comando raids as I originally thought.

Some recruiters inside our organization noticed that some of our jobs weren't being presented correctly on "Getthejob.com." I went to the site and saw that not only are they not presenting our jobs correctly (factually incorrect data) but that they take our material to create follow-on pages that look like hell so that they generate more space inventory.

Compare the experience:

Here is one of the original pages that is getting scraped.

Indeed.com gets it right (thanks Indeed!)

SimplyHired.com gets it right (thanks SimplyHired!)

Jobster.com gets it right (although they are still only scraping our job board listings, not the jobs.ea.com website itself, which is a bit of a bummer, but regardless, thanks Jobster!)

By contrast, Getthejob.com has the wrong data (the jobs they retrieve aren't for our Jamdat Mobile division), take our content (as John would point out, copyrighted content), format it like garbage (check it out here) so that they can sell more ads and then continue to "jack" our jobs by putting a frame on top of the results page when you click "View and apply to this job direct from this employers website" at the bottom of the follow-on display page.  But it gets even better. Click on a link inside the jobs.ea.com page that is so framed and you continue to get the "Getthejob" frameheader. I have heard of bad web etiquette before but this really takes the cake.

As I have said before, I like our job ads being jacked as I think it delivers a lot of value for us as a company (more people find our jobs). But I have also said that I assumed (due to my experiences with SimplyHired, Indeed and Jobster) that the "jacker" would be a good web citizen and work like the major search engines: you put in a query, get a result and are delivered to the originating material when you click on the results link. Unfortunately, companies like Getthejob are proving John's point.

So, Jobster, Indeed and SimplyHired - keep doing what you are doing and thanks for the free service. My lawn looks great. Getthejob - consider yourself shut-off. I leave my lawn to the professionals.

Comments

[Bob Wilson]

Excellent post Jeff!

In every business niche there are reputable firms, and a few who give the niche a bad name.

Thanks for pointing out the difference between the good and the bad.

Bob

[Jeff Tokarz]

Crawling, indexing and delivering job search results from disparate Web properties is today's technology du jour! Scraping content without 100% attribution - regardless of relevance - is a detriment to job seekers, job boards, employers, recruiters, etc. Equally challenging is the notion that job seekers will remain contented with job boards and job search engines that fail to deliver relevant job search results. Giving job seekers more of what THEY want (exceedingly relevant matching job leads) and less of what they don't want is tomorrow morning's technology du jour!