Open Letter to Ray Fassett of Employ Media Regarding Revenue Share for Dot Jobs Domains

Dear Mr. Fassett,

Thank you again for your “courtesy call” yesterday in which you asked me to retract the portion of my comment at the Wall Street Journal web site and CollegeRecruiter.com Blog in which I wrote, “Ray Fassett of Employ Media has been asking job boards for revenue shares for the domains.”

Although it was difficult for me to understand what the courtesy call was regarding as you seemed reluctant to directly state your concern and instead seemed to want me to identify for you what was of concern to you, I ended up understanding that you wanted me to retract that statement and if I didn’t that Employ Media would take legal action against either CollegeRecruiter.com, me, or both. After ending our call, I considered the issue and essentially reminded myself that my primary concern wasn’t about the revenue share and that I didn’t want that to distract Employ Media, CollegeRecruiter.com, or any other entity from the crux of the matter. In addition, I had no written documentation to substantiate the revenue share statement. As a result of both factors, I retracted the statement both on the Wall Street Journal site as well as on CollegeRecruiter.com.

Two job boards later posted comments to CollegeRecruiter.com Blog indicating that they did have a revenue sharing discussion with you. One of the two comments unequivocally indicates that you raised the revenue share option. The other comment generally supports the first but does not directly indicate whether the option of a revenue share was raised first by you or the representative of the second job board.

I’m hoping that you will choose to participate in an open, honest, and transparent manner by posting a comment on CollegeRecruiter.com Blog regarding Employ Media’s requests for a share of the revenue from job boards or other organizations who seek to own a dot jobs domain. I suspect that you’ve made no such requests of direct employers as that wouldn’t be consistent with their model — they don’t make money by hiring people. But given the statements of the two job board owners, I think that seeing your response would be helpful to the job board, staffing, association, newspaper, recruiter, and members of other communities who object to Employ Media’s plans for dot jobs.

Clearly the two job board owners on one side of the discussion and you on the other can’t all be correct regarding the issue of whether you requested a share of revenues from them should they wish to obtain a .jobs domain. You ended up being pretty clear with me yesterday in our call that no one from Employ Media, including you, had ever requested a revenue share from anyone in return for a .jobs domain. I’m hoping that you can explain your perspective on this issue to my readers and me.

Sincerely,

Steven Rothberg
President and Founder
CollegeRecruiter.com

Wall Street Journal covers the dot jobs domain scandal

For employment and now small business writer Sarah Needleman penned an article for today’s Wall Street Journal that does a pretty good job of summarizing the scandal launched by Employ Media, Direct Employers Association, and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) last year when they tried to expand who could use the top level domain .jobs and for what purpose. ICANN, the international governing body for domain names, created .jobs five years ago after SHRM promised to be the watch dog and ensure that only employers purchased and used the domains and only to promote their own jobs, so you’d have toyota.jobs to promote Toyota’s jobs but you wouldn’t have Monster.jobs to drive job seekers to Monster’s job board.

As Sarah’s article did a good job of pointing out, all of that may now be changing if Employ Media gets its way. ICANN approved the request to expand the charter, apparently paving the way for Employ Media to create tens and probably hundreds of thousands of new domains such as diversity.jobs, great.jobs, newyork.jobs and many, many, many more. What’s the problem with that, you say? Isn’t this just job boards whining about more competition? Well, for some job board owners that’s all this is but they’re missing the point as is anyone else who thinks that’s the issue. The issue is the process this has followed has been fundamentally flawed and has lacked openness and transparency. If you want to buy just about any domain, you can go to a registrar like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, pull out your credit card, and buy it. You know that they won’t keep the best ones for themselves or their friends and they won’t ask you for a share of the revenues generated from the domain. If Employ Media gets its way, it will apparently keep the best domains for itself and its friends and it has already approached job board owners to request a share of revenues if Employ Media grants their request for their .jobs domain name.

Remember that ICANN approved the creation of .jobs to allow employers to drive traffic to their own career pages and SHRM was to act as the watch dog. Sarah’s story unfortunately mischaracterized that when it stated that SHRM was supposed to ensure that the users of the dot jobs domains are in the “job-site realm.” That’s not correct. That would mean that job boards and perhaps also staffing companies, third party recruiters, etc. could purchase .jobs domains to drive candidates to their job sites. The dot jobs charter which was awarded by ICANN five years expressly forbids that and limits the use of the dot jobs top level domain only to employers. So Toyota can (and has) purchased toyota.jobs to drive job seekers to its own career section but Employ Media has been forbidden to sell domains such as CollegeRecruiter.jobs if we were to use that to drive candidates to our job board. In other words, you can promote your own openings with your own dot jobs, but not the openings of other organizations. So job boards have not been able to buy dot jobs domains.

What Employ Media is trying to do is continue to be the registrar by being the organization that decides who gets what domain and at what price (Ray Fassett of Employ Media has been asking job boards for revenue shares for the domains) and also the owner of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of job boards that it creates. Yes, there’s now an RFP process, but no one outside of Employ Media seems to know the criteria that will be used to determine who gets what domain and at what price.

Follow-up note from 12:20pm — Ray Fassett just called and said he was making a “courtesy call” to tell me that if I didn’t retract the revenue share statement that Employ Media would take legal action against me. I don’t have written proof of that and whether Employ Media has or will ask for revenue shares or not isn’t really the point. So, Ray, consider the statement retracted. I have no desire to get into a legal battle with you or anyone else at Employ Media. We can agree to disagree on the merits of what Employ Media wants to do with .jobs and not make our lawyers wealthier in the process.

False Information Regarding .jobs Scandal

Yesterday I received a letter via FedEx from Dan Jordan, chief counsel for DirectEmployers Association, a member of their board of directors, and chief counsel for the related JobCentral. Dan was upset that I wrote that Employ Media was owned by DirectEmployers Association. That’s not the case, as you can see from this scanned copy of his letter.
Dan’s letter demanded that I “effectuate a complete and comprehensive retraction of the aforementioned false information” and indicated that my “failure to do so will be considered an act of actual malice that must be defended and for which injunctive relief must be sought.” Ouch. I actually corrected the blog article a day before receiving the letter from Dan and also sent out a correction to my 150,000+ social media followers, friends, and connections. But to ensure that I left no stone unturned, I also emailed 113,000+ college career service office professionals, job seekers, and others and provided them with an explanation of the issue and copy of Dan’s letter in case I didn’t do as good of a job as Dan would have liked me to do of explaining that DEA does not own EA. Oh yeah, and I also reminded the 113,000+ recipients of the facts of the .jobs scandal and what they should do about it today or tomorrow. Here’s what I sent to them:

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Would Employ Media Really Create a Million Job Boards With .Jobs Domain Name Extension?

The .jobs domain name scandal continues to brew. The for profit Employ Media in alliance with the non-profits Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and DirectEmployers Association is attempting to expand the .jobs domain charter it obtained five years ago. Under the existing charter, quality employers like American Airlines are able to register and use domains such as AmericanAirlines.jobs if they feel that would make it easier for job seekers to get to the career sections of their web sites. The expansion would allow Employ Media to create an infinite number of new .jobs domains and either use the names themselves, sell them to other organizations under terms which are not open and transparent so some organizations may be denied while others are accepted at differing terms, or a combination of the two. In addition, domains such as Diversity.jobs and Nursing.jobs would be created even though there already exist job boards such as DiversityJobs.com and NursingJobs.com.
Dozens of job board association members, human resource professionals, employers, and other stakeholders have already used the template posted to CollegeRecruiter.com to voice their objections to the proposed expansion of the charter and I suspect that we’ll see dozens more before the deadline of this Thursday, July 15th. It takes only a few minutes to copy the template, paste it into the body of a new email, edit it to include your organization name and contact information, and email it to ICANN.

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Open Letter from Ted Daywalt of VetJobs to ICANN Regarding Transfer of .jobs Domains from SHRM to Employ Media

As reported earlier today by John Zappe of ERE, “[t]he expansion of the .jobs Internet address has been given the go-ahead by the Society for Human Resource Management, paving the way for the launch of what could be hundreds of thousands of new job boards. SHRM made the announcement this morning.”
Why should any job seeker, employer, job board owner, or other human resource professional care? Because the process stunk and lacked an open, honest, and transparent process. Despite SHRM’s many, many excellent conferences, publications, and other contributions to the human resource communities, it is making a terrible mistake here by seemingly washing its hands of a situation that it set in motion in 2005 when it partnered with Employ Media and petitioned ICANN to create the .jobs domain.
The approval specified that the .jobs domain names would be issued only with organization names and sold only to those organizations, so Microsoft could buy microsoft.jobs and Walmart could buy walmart.jobs and use those domains to drive job seekers to their corporate career sites, but CollegeRecruiter.com could not buy CollegeRecruiter.jobs and drive candidates to its job board as we would have jobs from other organizations on our job board. Similarly, Microsoft could not buy domains such as redmond.jobs or software.jobs. That’s all about to change and the only winner here is Employ Media.

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Why HR Professionals Need to Care About the .jobs Controversy

A few years ago, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) helped to create a new domain extension to make it easier for employers to market their job opportunities to candidates. No longer would IBM need to direct candidates to its home page and then hope that they find the Careers or Jobs link somewhere on that page or, with some organizations, even on some interior page. Now IBM and every other employer could plunk down a small amount of coin, buy IBM.jobs or whatever domain is appropriate for their organization, include that domain in the employment marketing materials, and rest easy in the knowledge that all of their recruiting problems were forever solved.
Those goals weren’t realistic and the efforts to sell the domains fell far short of expections. Enter Direct Employers. Last fall it announced plans to start using the domains in a manner never envisioned by SHRM or others involved in the creation of the .jobs domains. Rather than using them exclusively to drive job seekers to employment opportunities on employer web sites, Direct Employers would use the domains to create thousands of new job boards such as atlanta.jobs and engineer.jobs.

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How to Tell Your Job Board is a Ripoff

There’s been a lot of media coverage recently to job boards which are merely schemes to take advantage of job seekers even though they are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. So I was very happy to see Alison Doyle of About.com tackle this very subject. Alison lists and describes a number of characteristics which are indicative of a job board which you should stay away from:

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Scamming the U.S. Department of Labor’s Tools for America’s Job Seekers Challenge

Incredible. Just when you thought you’d seen everything along comes something that just blows your mind.
The U.S. Department of Labor, in partial response to the worst recession in seven decades, created the Tools for America’s Job Seekers Challenge web site. Job boards and other organizations were asked to register and provide a description of how their services could be of benefit to the millions of job seekers who have been victimized by this terrible economy.

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How to Spot Fake Job Listings During the Recession

False job advertisements are the last thing we need right now. Canvasing, cold calling, street promoting, work at homes, and security positions are just a few of the devil’s evil tricks in the career section of your newspaper or online job website.
I’m sure everyone has had this experience at least once in their life — You find a job listing online or in a paper, you know you qualify for it, it looks good, so you applied to it. A day or two later, you get called in for an interview. It wasn’t until halfway through the interview that you found out the hidden agenda which could involve anything from cold calling, selling products, working off of commission, and so forth.
So you kindly reject the offer and leave the interview, disappointed, discouraged, and just flat out upset that there’s companies out there who are willing to deceive so many unemployed people out there. I know how you feel, because I’m looking for a second job right now and I’ve been going through the same thing. Let this be a guide for you to follow while job hunting. Continue reading …
Article by, Stephen Brno and courtesy of Associated Content, Inc.

Useful Tips to Avoid Overseas Jobs Scams

Ever run across a job that is on one of those job listing services that promises an exotic life of big bucks and promises the good life? Chances are, it is one of the thousands of typical overseas employment scams that many good people fall victim to. Let’s face it, if a particular job seems too good to be true, there is at least a 50% chance that they are running overseas job scams.
One should educate oneself on how people actually conduct the scam and thereby gain insight on how to avoid employment scams. Avoid overseas job scams in any possible way you can and I will provide you some knowledge on how to better prepare yourself with basic common sense and logic. There is no job that comes that easy. Think about it, what kind of legitimate job actually charges a fee to get on with them and then they begin to pay you your annual paycheck? Continue reading …
Article by, Andrew Miller and courtesy of Associated Content, Inc.