Dirty Life and Times

Matt Martone, a sales guy over at Hotjobs, runs a pretty nice blog about Employment Branding. His recent post about site traffic to some of the more "known" players in online recruiting brought some of the CEO's from the sites he mentioned out of the woodwork and into the comments section (I'm not endorsing his use of Alexa statistics to prove his point, but that's another story for another time).

But this isn't about Matt Martone, and it's not about Hotjobs. It's about the comment Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster left about what they are doing to attract job seeker, i.e. consumer, traffic. He was trying to explain the (relatively) anemic site traffic to Jobster.com.

His response:

at jobster we haven't spent a braincell on traffic yet. my attitude towards consumer traffic is first build a great product, second build a great product, third build a great product, 100th get traffic. we're about in step 2 right now with many more to go before we turn to traffic. which we will soon, just not yet. when we're ready for the world to know about jobster, it will. for now, the fact that every recruiter in the u.s. knows about jobster is enough -- that's who we sell to today and what we sell to them today is not based on traffic at all.

So Jason, how to explain this:

This ad appeared on Rotoworld.com -- a site I use for fantasy sports information -- with the tagline "Find Your Next Job at Jobster.com". It's definitely a job seeker targeted ad, and while it may not have cost Jobster a "braincell", this is definitely spending on job seeker traffic.

Now granted, Jason's comment appeared on Dec. 6th, so maybe by "yet" and "soon" he meant 8 days later, but perhaps Matt's posting ruffled a few feathers over at Chez Jobster? One of the criticisms I've heard of the Jobster service is that it involves a lot of time on the recruiter side to create "talent networks", so certainly attracting job seekers to the Jobster service is good strategy. But let's just make sure the left side of the brain knows what the right side is doing, capiche?