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linked page.
 Lame
(June 20, 2001) We're thinking about lobbying Capitol Hill for a
"technologies with disabilities act". Some of what passes for gee-whiz
material turns out to be missing the gee....it's all whiz and no bang, so
to speak. Spidered job posting (do nothing recruiting) is rapidly rising
to the top of our list.
An incredibly automated method for clogging the communications
channels with nonsense, job spidering (job scraping) is better understood
as a marvelous research tool than as an innovation in online recruiting.
It's great for counting jobs and creating alternative approaches to
economic modelling.
An earlier article on this subject raised a number of fundamental
questions from readers. Spidered job postings (as provided by bulk
suppliers like CareerCast, Zycus and FlipDog) is a technique pioneered by
Junglee in the early stages of the Online Recruiting Industry. The
spidering company identifies the URLs of employment areas on corporate
websites (and, sometimes, other job boards). A list of these URLs is "fed"
to "spiders" (software that visits the URLs and grabs all of the text).
The text is then processed in a variety of ways to reduce it to job
listings in the database. The results are presented in a single database
(FlipDog), as a network of job boards (CareerCast) or in the flow of other
data (Zycus).
>From the corporate recruiter's perspective, the fantasy of the
elimination of administrative rework is what's being sold. In theory, all
a recruiter has to do is to post jobs to the company's website and all
else is automatically completed through the magic of modern technology. If
only the system could automatically know where the poster wanted the jobs
distributed (that requires a Job Advertising Distribution Service and
administrative attention to each job, however).
In addition to nonsensical clutter (see these jobs in "Mill
Valley, CA" as provided by CareerCast versus no Mill Valley Jobs from
FlipDog), the very technique poses intellectual property issues galore.
We rarely see a corporate website that doesn't include a copyright
statement on the front page. The job spidering tactics employed by
CareerCast and FlipDog (Zycus appears to only operate on a customer's
specific request) raise all sorts of ownership and permission issues. It's
surprising, frankly, that so many newspapers are using the approach. With
intellectual property protection at the core of their enterprises, we
wonder how they sanction investment in and participation with companies
that pay so little attention to ownership issues. (Requiring permission in
advance of spidering would put the little companies in this sector out of
business immediately.)
We're guessing that TMP's recent acquisition of Flip Dog must mean
that the company is willing to have it's jobs databases spidered (in spite
of what the membership agreement says). After all, the same issues of data
ownership apply to all companies being spidered whether they are a job
board or an employer. It gets worse.
We see some evidence that cookies are being used across these fledgling
networks. While the automatic completion of our zip code is a convenience,
we wonder if the job boards that are "powered by" one company or another
have a real grasp of how much of their data is being concentrated beyond
their control. Certainly, as managers of huge chunks of data, Cowboy
technologists often overstep their bounds when acting on behalf of their
customers. Fortunately, the hands off approach to these vendors (by their
customers) puts liability an arms length away.
Like bicycles with wings or other technical silliness, we are in a
phase of development that produces approaches that will seem laughable
somewhere down the road. It's healthy experimentation and early
conceptualization. Like most experiments, the predictable failures often
produce the insight required to move the industry ahead. So, we salute the
hard working engineers involved in job scraping, we know that the "bike
won't fly".
- John Sumser
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