Although HotJobs and GoogleBase revenues and profits are not broken out in the financial statements released by their parent organizations, I think that it is safe to assume that none of the four come close to being profitable. So what is with the buzz about free postings? Employers like 'em and so does the media, but should shareholders? We'll see.

I do believe that postings are a commodity product so there may be validity in giving them away in the hopes of converting some of those employers into paying clients, but a big problem with giving away your products for free even for a short time is that you train your clients into believing that they are paying for your products what they're worth: nothing. Will enough of these clients understand that they're not really using Jobster if all they do is post free jobs? Or will too many of these clients now be able to convince themselves that they're using Jobster even though they're only posting jobs? My hope is that these clients will have a positive experience and upgrade as that would be a positive for the entire industry, but my fear is that with Jobster only having 200,000 profiles a/k/a resumes from registered users, the employers who post jobs simply won't get enough quantity or quality of responses to justify their time. Since we went live in 1996, we've never had a client tell us that any of our services were too expensive if those services worked. Surely the converse is true as well in that even free services are too expensive if they don't work. Time for most of our clients is far more valuable than the cost of a job posting or targeted email campaign.

The Jobster - Facebook partnership makes a lot of sense from a traffic generation standpoint for Jobster and likely a revenue generation standpoint for Facebook, but what remains to be seen is whether it will translate into profitability generator for Jobster. I believe that it will but this isn't a sure thing at all.

Monster and Careerbuilder trumpeted their partnerships with Facebook and abandoned their efforts almost as quickly. Jobster, to its credit, is taking a different approach by doing more on Facebook than just throwing up some banner and text link ads. Jobster will actually power a career center for Facebook.

But will employers be able to overcome their belief that Facebook is nothing more than an 21st century version of a 1980's video arcade with kids hanging out and doing things of which their parents would disapprove? Will employers pay to post job openings to Facebook or will those be free as they are now on Jobster? If employers get to post jobs for free, will enough upgrade to paid services in order for this partnership to be profitable for Jobster?