Fwd: False Information Regarding .jobs Scandal
-----Original Message----- From: CollegeRecruiter.com <steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Keith Parris <kparrisnetmail@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wed, Jul 14, 2010 1:17 pm Subject: False Information Regarding .jobs Scandal Keith Parris Hopefully you've had an opportunity to read through the email that I sent to you a couple of days ago regarding the request being made by Employ Media to expand its charter over the .jobs top level domain so that it could use or otherwise help create hundreds of thousands and perhaps more than a million new job boards. Shortly after sending out that letter and posting a related blog article to CollegeRecruiter.com, I was contacted by a member of the DirectEmployers Association who was furious that I mistakenly wrote that the non-profit DirectEmployers owned the for-profit Employ Media. I took him at his word and corrected the blog article while talking with him and also sent out a correction to my 150,000+ Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn connections. Dan Jordan, chief counsel to DirectEmployers, then sent the attached demand letter to me via FedEx. As you can see, he stated that "Employ Media is not, nor ever has been, owned by DirectEmployers." That's good enough for me and I take him at his word. My apologies, Dan. It is clear from some on-line research that Employ Media is at least partially owned by Second Generation Ltd. of Cleveland, Ohio. If you're not familiar with them, that's likely because they don't have much of a presence in the employment world outside of Employ Media. A couple of their other companies are Partners, "a direct marketing company with over 400 salespeople coast to coast selling matted framed art to businesses" and USA Parking, a "parking and real estate company." But the point of the blog article and my email to you wasn't the ownership structure of DirectEmployers or Employ Media. The point was the lack of openness and transparency in the efforts of a number of players to fundamentally revolutionize the way that the .jobs domains can be used and the process that is being used to accomplish that dubious goal. Five years ago, ICANN -- the international governing body of domain names -- provided SHRM and Employ Media a charter to sell .jobs domains to employers such as XYZ Corp. so that they could tell job seekers to go to XYZCorp.jobs if they want to go directly to the employment information on the XYZ Corp. web site. That was a good idea. Unfortunately, although there are some 13 million employers in the U.S. alone, only 15,000 employers worldwide bought a .jobs domain and many of those who did just re-directed it to their already existing career page. Although at times this month Employ Media has denied that it has a partnership agreement with DirectEmployers while simultaneously promoting their alliance, at the end of the day what matters is that the process they've followed stinks. Plain and simple. Even though I'm an owner of job board CollegeRecruiter.com and therefore will be directly impacted by Employ Media's desire to create hundreds of thousands and perhaps a million apparently cookie cutter job boards like Government.jobs, University.jobs, Nursing.jobs, Diversity.jobs, SeattleSoftwareEngineer.jobs, and more, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with the creation of new job boards because we've been around since 1996 when there were about 200 job boards worldwide and there are now about 100,000. I've seen that we can more than hold our own even though there are many new boards. What I'm concerned about is the process. It is clear from reading the request by Employ Media to expand the .jobs charter that it wants to take the use of the .jobs domains out of the employer community to which it is restricted by its current charter (the one it requested and was then granted five years ago) and into other communities such as recruiting agencies, staffing companies, job boards, career services, and more. I'd be fine with this if Employ Media were simply functioning as a seller of the .jobs domains and anyone else could buy them at the same terms as anyone else like happens with .com and .net addresses. But that's not what's being proposed. If Employ Media is granted the expansion of the charter, you'll almost certainly see hundreds of thousands and perhaps a million new job boards spring up almost overnight. Employers will be able to post their jobs to them for free just like they can now with many, many aggregators such as Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com, JuJu.com, and LinkUp.com. Job seekers will continue to use Google, Bing, and other search engines to find relevant job boards and employer sites but now they'll have another million sites to sift through. Employ Media and the owners of these so-called "free" sites will charge premium pricing to employers who want their results to appear at the top of the search results -- just like Indeed, SimplyHired, JuJu, and LinkUp -- and employers who work with the "free" sites know that their jobs are essentially invisible unless they pay for those premium listings. If I were Employ Media, I'd be the most excited about my ability to suck in huge amounts of job seeker traffic using the free content I'm getting from the members of the DirectEmployers Association and other employers and then leveraging that traffic to generate revenues from on-line and other schools when job seekers are asked if they want to continue their education, get their credit ratings checked, become members of on-line survey panels, and other such pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-click offers that litter many job boards. Those "sales," "leads," and "clicks" are sold by job boards and others for widely varying sums but the education leads alone are typically worth about $10 to $20 per pop. If the only revenue Employ Media generates are education leads and they generate only one per day per board, that's about $10 million per day or $3.65 billion per year. No wonder Employ Media wants this so badly. Other than the ability to post jobs for free to a bunch of new job boards, it is difficult for me to understand why DirectEmployers is taking such an active role in this process and why any organization other than Employ Media would be excited about this. I trust that there's no secret, financial relationship underlying the "alliance" between DirectEmployers and Employ Media given their written statement earlier this month that they have no partnership agreement. If this bothers you even a fraction as much as it bothers me, it is critical that you take action today as the deadline for ICANN comment period is tomorrow. Fortunately, it is very easy for you to voice your opinions. Simply send an email to jobs-phased-allocation@xxxxxxxxx. You can even forward this one. Be sure to include your contact information and organization you represent, if any. If you want a template to follow, I posted one in my blog article. Oh, and please cc me on the email. That will allow me to see that my efforts have in some way made a difference. Sincerely, Steven Rothberg | Chief Executive Officer _______________________________________________________________ CollegeRecruiter.com | College Career Connector Selected by WEDDLE's as a Top Job Board 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 Proud to be a woman-owned, small business Web: http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com Email: Steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Direct: 952-848-2211 | Mobile: 952-217-0793 | Toll Free: 800-835-4989 x704 | eFax: 702-537-2227 sjrcollege CollegeRecruiter.com Blog HR Should Use Twitter Like Virgin Airlines Uses It for Customer Service CollegeRecruiter.com 3109 W 50 St Ste 121 Minneapolis, MN 55410-2102 To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?jCxsrBy0zKwczMzMDOy0RrTszCxMrBzM Attachment:
directemployers-association.pdf |