Employment website
Encyclopedia
An employment website is a web site dealing specifically with employment
or careers. Many employment websites are designed to allow employers to post job requirements for a position to be filled and are commonly known as job boards. Other employment
sites offer employer reviews, career and job-search advice describe different job descriptions or employers. Through a job website a prospective employee can locate and fill out a job application
or submit resume
s over the Internet for the advertised position.
In 1994 Robert J. McGovern began NetStart Inc. as software sold to companies for listing job openings on their Web sites and manage the incoming e-mails those listings generated. After an influx of two million dollars in investment capital he then transported this software to its own web address, at first listing the job openings from the companies who utilized the software. NetStart Inc. changed its name in 1998 to operate under the name of their software, CareerBuilder
. The company received a further influx of seven million dollars from investment firms such as New Enterprise Associates to expand their operations.
Six major newspapers joined forces in 1995 to list their classified sections online. The service was called CareerPath.com and featured help-wanted listings from the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News and the Washington Post.
The industry attempted to reach a broader, less tech-savvy base in 1998 when Hotjobs.com attempted to buy a Super Bowl
spot, but Fox rejected the ad for being in poor taste. The ad featured a janitor at a zoo sweeping out the Elephant cage completely unbeknownst to the animal. The elephant sits down briefly and when it stands back up, the janitor has disappeared. The ad meant to illustrate a need for those stuck in jobs they hate, and offer a solution through their Web site. Hotjobs.com promptly fired the advertising agency
who created the ad.
Monster.com
gambled on a 1999 Super Bowl
ad. CEO Jeff Taylor authorized three 30 second spots for a total of four million dollars. The ad which featured children speaking like adults, drolly intoning their dream of working at various dead-end jobs to humorous effect were far more popular than rival Hotjobs.com ad about a security guard who transitions from a low paying security job to the same job at a fancier building.Monster.com
was elevated to the top spot of online employment sites. Hotjobs.com's ad wasn't as successful, but it gave the company enough of a boost for its IPO in August.
After being purchased in a joint venture by Knight Ridder
and Tribune Company
in July, CareerBuilder
absorbed competitor boards CareerPath.com and then Headhunter.net which had already acquired CareerMosaic. Even with these aggressive mergers CareerBuilder
still trailed behind the number one employment site Jobsonline.com, number two Monster.com
and number three Hotjobs.com.
Monster.com
made a move in 2001 to purchase Hotjobs.com for $374 million in stock
, but were unsuccessful due to Yahoo's unsolicited cash and stock bid of $430 million late in the year. Yahoo had previously announced plans to enter the job board business, but decided to jump start that venture by purchasing the established brand. By August 2002, Monster.com
posted a loss of $504 million forcing COO James Treacy to resign.
that facilitates job hunting
and range from large scale generalist sites to niche job boards for job categories such as engineering
, legal, insurance
, social work
, teaching as well as cross-sector categories such as green job
s, ethical job
s and seasonal jobs. Users can typically deposit their résumé
s and submit them to potential employers, while employers can post job ads and search for potential employees.
The term job search engine might refer to a job board with a search engine
style interface, or to a web site that actually indexes and searches other web sites.
As of July 2009 and according to comScore Media Metrix, the most visited job boards were CareerBuilder
, Yahoo! HotJobs, and Monster.com
.
s that collect results from multiple independent job boards. This is an example of both metasearch (since these are search engines which search other search engines) and vertical search
(since the searches are limited to a specific topic - job listings).
Some of these new search engines primarily index traditional job boards. These sites aim to provide a "one-stop shop" for job-seekers who don't need to search the underlying job boards. In 2006, tensions developed between the job boards and several scraper site
s, with Craigslist
banning scrapers from its job classifieds and Monster.com
specifically banning scrapers through its adoption of a robots exclusion standard
on all its pages while others have embraced them.
Other job search engines index pages only from employers' websites, such as LinkUp
, Indeed, Hound, and Eluta.ca
(Canada) choosing to bypass traditional job boards entirely. These vertical search engines allow jobseekers to find new positions that may not be advertised on the traditional job boards.
. Typical comments are about management
, working conditions, and pay
. Although employer review websites may produce links to potential employers, they do not typically list vacancies.
Venture capital, mergers and acquisitions have been active in the job board industry for more than a decade. In 2008, several private equity firms started the process of piecing together large job board networks while other firms attempted to expand through acquisition.
and contact details. While this is attractive for the site operators (who sell access to the resume bank to headhunters and recruiters), job-seekers exercise caution in uploading personal information, since they have no control over where their resume will eventually be seen. Their resume may be viewed by a current employer or, worse, by fraudsters who may use information from it to amass and sell personal contact information, or even perpetrate identity theft
.
Employment
Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...
or careers. Many employment websites are designed to allow employers to post job requirements for a position to be filled and are commonly known as job boards. Other employment
Employment
Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...
sites offer employer reviews, career and job-search advice describe different job descriptions or employers. Through a job website a prospective employee can locate and fill out a job application
Application for employment
An application for employment, job application, or application form is a form or collection of forms that an individual seeking employment, called an applicant, must fill out as part of the process of informing an employer of the applicant's availability and desire to be employed, and persuading...
or submit resume
Résumé
A résumé is a document used by individuals to present their background and skillsets. Résumés can be used for a variety of reasons but most often to secure new employment. A typical résumé contains a summary of relevant job experience and education...
s over the Internet for the advertised position.
History
The Online Career Center launched in 1993 as a non-profit organization backed by forty major corporations as a system for job hunters to store their resumes within the databases as well as for recruiters to post job openings to the databases.In 1994 Robert J. McGovern began NetStart Inc. as software sold to companies for listing job openings on their Web sites and manage the incoming e-mails those listings generated. After an influx of two million dollars in investment capital he then transported this software to its own web address, at first listing the job openings from the companies who utilized the software. NetStart Inc. changed its name in 1998 to operate under the name of their software, CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder.com is the largest online employment website in the United States, with more than 23 million unique visitors each month and a 34% market share of help-wanted web sites in the United States. CareerBuilder.com provides online career search services for more than 1,900 partners as of...
. The company received a further influx of seven million dollars from investment firms such as New Enterprise Associates to expand their operations.
Six major newspapers joined forces in 1995 to list their classified sections online. The service was called CareerPath.com and featured help-wanted listings from the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News and the Washington Post.
The industry attempted to reach a broader, less tech-savvy base in 1998 when Hotjobs.com attempted to buy a Super Bowl
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League , the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather...
spot, but Fox rejected the ad for being in poor taste. The ad featured a janitor at a zoo sweeping out the Elephant cage completely unbeknownst to the animal. The elephant sits down briefly and when it stands back up, the janitor has disappeared. The ad meant to illustrate a need for those stuck in jobs they hate, and offer a solution through their Web site. Hotjobs.com promptly fired the advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
who created the ad.
Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
gambled on a 1999 Super Bowl
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League , the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather...
ad. CEO Jeff Taylor authorized three 30 second spots for a total of four million dollars. The ad which featured children speaking like adults, drolly intoning their dream of working at various dead-end jobs to humorous effect were far more popular than rival Hotjobs.com ad about a security guard who transitions from a low paying security job to the same job at a fancier building.Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
was elevated to the top spot of online employment sites. Hotjobs.com's ad wasn't as successful, but it gave the company enough of a boost for its IPO in August.
After being purchased in a joint venture by Knight Ridder
Knight Ridder
Knight Ridder was an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. Until it was bought by The McClatchy Company on June 27, 2006, it was the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, with 32 daily newspapers sold.- History :The corporate ancestors of...
and Tribune Company
Tribune Company
The Tribune Company is a large American multimedia corporation based in Chicago, Illinois. It is the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher, with ten daily newspapers and commuter tabloids including Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida...
in July, CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder.com is the largest online employment website in the United States, with more than 23 million unique visitors each month and a 34% market share of help-wanted web sites in the United States. CareerBuilder.com provides online career search services for more than 1,900 partners as of...
absorbed competitor boards CareerPath.com and then Headhunter.net which had already acquired CareerMosaic. Even with these aggressive mergers CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder.com is the largest online employment website in the United States, with more than 23 million unique visitors each month and a 34% market share of help-wanted web sites in the United States. CareerBuilder.com provides online career search services for more than 1,900 partners as of...
still trailed behind the number one employment site Jobsonline.com, number two Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
and number three Hotjobs.com.
Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
made a move in 2001 to purchase Hotjobs.com for $374 million in stock
Stock
The capital stock of a business entity represents the original capital paid into or invested in the business by its founders. It serves as a security for the creditors of a business since it cannot be withdrawn to the detriment of the creditors...
, but were unsuccessful due to Yahoo's unsolicited cash and stock bid of $430 million late in the year. Yahoo had previously announced plans to enter the job board business, but decided to jump start that venture by purchasing the established brand. By August 2002, Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
posted a loss of $504 million forcing COO James Treacy to resign.
Job postings
A job board is a websiteWebsite
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
that facilitates job hunting
Job hunting
Job hunting, job seeking, or job searching is the act of looking for employment, due to unemployment or discontent with a current position. The immediate goal of job seeking is usually to obtain a job interview with an employer which may lead to getting hired...
and range from large scale generalist sites to niche job boards for job categories such as engineering
Engineering
Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
, legal, insurance
Insurance
In law and economics, insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for payment. An insurer is a company selling the...
, social work
Social work
Social Work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or...
, teaching as well as cross-sector categories such as green job
Green job
A green job, also called a green-collar job is, according to the United Nations Environment Program, "work in agricultural, manufacturing, research and development , administrative, and service activities that contribute substantially to preserving or restoring environmental quality...
s, ethical job
Ethical job
An ethical job is a broad term to describe a job which accords with a person's ethics or values.Ethical jobs may include green jobs, community sector jobs and jobs in the international aid sector....
s and seasonal jobs. Users can typically deposit their résumé
Résumé
A résumé is a document used by individuals to present their background and skillsets. Résumés can be used for a variety of reasons but most often to secure new employment. A typical résumé contains a summary of relevant job experience and education...
s and submit them to potential employers, while employers can post job ads and search for potential employees.
The term job search engine might refer to a job board with a search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
style interface, or to a web site that actually indexes and searches other web sites.
As of July 2009 and according to comScore Media Metrix, the most visited job boards were CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder.com is the largest online employment website in the United States, with more than 23 million unique visitors each month and a 34% market share of help-wanted web sites in the United States. CareerBuilder.com provides online career search services for more than 1,900 partners as of...
, Yahoo! HotJobs, and Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
.
Metasearch and vertical search engines
Some web sites are simply search engineSearch engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
s that collect results from multiple independent job boards. This is an example of both metasearch (since these are search engines which search other search engines) and vertical search
Vertical search
A vertical search engine, as distinct from a general web search engine, focuses on a specific segment of online content. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, the automotive industry, legal information, medical...
(since the searches are limited to a specific topic - job listings).
Some of these new search engines primarily index traditional job boards. These sites aim to provide a "one-stop shop" for job-seekers who don't need to search the underlying job boards. In 2006, tensions developed between the job boards and several scraper site
Scraper site
A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping.In the last few years scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines...
s, with Craigslist
Craigslist
Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums....
banning scrapers from its job classifieds and Monster.com
Monster.com
Monster.com is one of the largest employment websites in the world, owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. Monster is one of the 20 most visited websites out of 100 million worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrics...
specifically banning scrapers through its adoption of a robots exclusion standard
Robots Exclusion Standard
The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to...
on all its pages while others have embraced them.
Other job search engines index pages only from employers' websites, such as LinkUp
LinkUp (website)
LinkUp is a job search engine that aggregates its job listings from employer websites, typically an employer's applicant tracking system. The objective of acquiring its job listings in this way is to prevent fraudulent and duplicate listings while bringing attention to unadvertised listings –...
, Indeed, Hound, and Eluta.ca
Eluta.ca
Eluta.ca is a job search engine that specializes in locating jobs in Canada. The Toronto-based search engine was launched on June 8, 2006 by the principals of Mediacorp Canada Inc., a specialty Canadian publisher of employment periodicals...
(Canada) choosing to bypass traditional job boards entirely. These vertical search engines allow jobseekers to find new positions that may not be advertised on the traditional job boards.
Employer review website
An employer review website is a type of employment website where past and current employees post comments about their experiences working for a company or organization. An employer review website normally takes the form of an internet forumInternet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
. Typical comments are about management
Management
Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...
, working conditions, and pay
Wage
A wage is a compensation, usually financial, received by workers in exchange for their labor.Compensation in terms of wages is given to workers and compensation in terms of salary is given to employees...
. Although employer review websites may produce links to potential employers, they do not typically list vacancies.
Pay For Performance (PFP)
The most recent second generation of employment websites, often referred to as Pay For Performance (PFP) involves charging for membership services rendered to jobseekers. The PFP category is expected to expand as consumers become more sophisticated and the universe of employment sites has become more cluttered.Industry structure
The success of jobs search engines in bridging the gap between jobseekers and employers has spawned thousands of job sites, many of which list job opportunities in a specific sector, such as education, health care, hospital management, academics and even in the non-governmental sector. These sites range from broad all-purpose job boards, to niche sites that serve various audiences, geographies, and industries. Many industry experts are encouraging jobseekers to concentrate on industry specific sector sites. With the increase in popularity of niche sites, other sites have begun to rank them in order of quality.Venture capital, mergers and acquisitions have been active in the job board industry for more than a decade. In 2008, several private equity firms started the process of piecing together large job board networks while other firms attempted to expand through acquisition.
Risks
Many jobs search engines and jobs boards encourage users to post their resumeRésumé
A résumé is a document used by individuals to present their background and skillsets. Résumés can be used for a variety of reasons but most often to secure new employment. A typical résumé contains a summary of relevant job experience and education...
and contact details. While this is attractive for the site operators (who sell access to the resume bank to headhunters and recruiters), job-seekers exercise caution in uploading personal information, since they have no control over where their resume will eventually be seen. Their resume may be viewed by a current employer or, worse, by fraudsters who may use information from it to amass and sell personal contact information, or even perpetrate identity theft
Identity theft
Identity theft is a form of stealing another person's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name...
.