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disturbing situation

  • To: <jobs-phased-allocation@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Subject: disturbing situation
  • From: "Will Smith" <smith.4818@xxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:15:30 -0400

7/14/2010

 

Greetings.

 

Please take just a few minutes to read what a colleague of mine has shared
with me regarding a disturbing situation.

 

Will Smith
Coordinator, Career Services 
The Ohio State University at Marion
1465 Mount Vernon Avenue
Marion, Ohio 43302-5628

Phone: (740) 725-6344
Fax: (740) 725-6133
E-mail: smith.4818@xxxxxxx
Web:  http://www.osumarion.osu.edu/career_services

 

"There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always time to do it
over."  -- Meskimen's Law

 

From: collegerecruit@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:collegerecruit@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of CollegeRecruiter.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2010 1:41 PM
To: Will Smith
Subject: False Information Regarding .jobs Scandal

 

Will Smith

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
<http://www.collegerecruiter.com/weblog/2010/07/how_and_why_to.php>  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 <http://www.twitter.com/stevenrothberg> ,
Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/rothberg> , and LinkedIn
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrothberg>  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 apologi! es, Dan.

 

It is clear from some on-line research that Employ Media is at least
partially owned by Second Generation Ltd.
<http://www.secondgen.com/portfolio.html>  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
<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U6uKtBAaewYJ:www.goto.
jobs/Beyond.com%2520letter-Employ%2520Media%2520Response.pdf+rich+milgram+ic
ann&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us>  with DirectEmployers while simultaneously
promoting their alliance <http://www.universe.jobs/about.html> , 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
<http://www.collegerecruiter.com/weblog/2010/07/how_and_why_to.php> . 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
3109 W 50 St Ste 121
Minneapolis, MN 55410-2102


Direct: 952-848-2211 | Mobile: 952-217-0793 | Toll Free: 800-835-4989 x704 |
eFax: 702-537-2227
Web: http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com <http://www.collegerecruiter.com/> 
E-mail: Steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



 

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Attachment: directemployers-association.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document



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