Ain't Transparency Great? Except When It Isn't?
One of my favorite recruiting blogosphere characters is Joel Cheesman, the resident human resource search engine optimization expert. I really like Joel, except for the fact that he is apparently a cat person. Oh well. No one can be perfect.
One of Joel's favorite topics is transparency. Today it came back to bite him a bit. And someone else. Joel posted a blog entry about Jobster marketing itself as having 30 million users when it is actually far, far less than that if you count only those people who actually go to the Jobster site. That was fine but what bit him was his speculation that Jobster's inflated count was due to them having an application on Facebook that helps candidates search the Jobster database. We do too. In fact, a number of job boards do. But Jobster's Christian Anderson posted a comment correcting Joel. It seems that Jobster is including in its counts the traffic from its affiliates. Hmmm.
We could combine our traffic with those of our affiliates too, I suppose. We have thousands of affiliates so if we add up all of their traffic and combine it with our traffic then the result is just as meaningless as either what Joel thought Jobster is doing or what Jobster is actually doing. Either way, Jobster is putting lipstick on a pig. Pigs are great, but they're pigs. Jobster is great, but it is Jobster. Its relevant traffic statistic is equal to the number of people who go to Jobster, not the number of people who go to Jobster and to sites which are paid for sending traffic to Jobster.
Transparency is a wonderful thing, all right. But in this case, I'm not sure if it was so wonderful for Joel or Christian. They both came out with lipstick on.
Love the pig picture! Did it take long to wrestle the pig to the ground and put the lipstick on? You know what they say about wrestling a pig… you both get dirty, but the pig likes it.
I did want to make one small clarification. We are not claiming our affiliates’ traffic as our own. We are letting employers know that they can now feature their jobs at the top of Jobster search results, targeted to specific Jobster user profiles, and across our new affiliate distribution network reaching more than 45 million people per month on more than 650 sites.
Employers can elect to feature their jobs at the rate of $2 per candidate or for a flat fee of $25 for unlimited candidates.
Cheers,
Christian Anderson
Jobster