As anyone in the recruitosphere knows, this week is the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) annual conference being held in the water-logged D.C. this year. The D.C. conference marks one year since the top-level domain – .jobs – had its coming out party in San Diego.
The introduction of the dotjobs top level domain name is supposed to provide a uniform and direct route for job seekers (as well as search engines) to find a company’s job openings – but getting companies or job seekers to pay attention to this new opportunity and what it offers for search engine optimization, still has not even approached general adoption. Further, most HR departments do not have the bandwidth to partner with IT or their web developers to leverage the SEO advantages that a top level domain can give them. I honestly think that a uniform and direct route to jobs on corporate web sites makes a lot of sense in the recruiting space – but the domain definitely has its share of naysayers. Allan Schweyer from Inc.com wrote an article called Dot Jobs? Not Likely, saying:
The good ideas are the ones that make life easier for us (eBay, Amazon, etc.) or democratize and broaden information options (weblogs, forums, etc.). Irrelevant ideas, like .jobs, add unnecessary layers and make things a little bit more confusing and time consuming for job seekers while benefiting only a few (SHRM and EmployMedia, for example).
So, WHAT has happened in a year? More registrars have been added (GoDaddy even became an approved registrar) and more vendors are offering to sign people up. In their best “we’re not just an irrelevant job board” voice, CareerBuilder is offering to handle the registration, set-up, maintenance and even search engine optimization services.
I think that it is interesting that Network Solutions still does not support the domain name. Since most WHOIS databases contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and Registrars, I was excited when I recently finally found out that GoDaddy has a WHOIS search for .jobs domains – here.
Let’s try a few:
- microsoft.jobs – registered but it just points to a “search engine optimized” holding page (hey…I thought Google didn’t like SEO “entry pages”)
- starbucks.jobs – registered and pointing to a Yahoo HotJobs profile?? I wasn’t expecting that.
- nissan.jobs – no WHOIS match
- genentech.jobs – registered with holding page
- valero.jobs – no WHOIS match
Many employers may have registered, but how many do YOU know that are actually using the domain? Have you come across any companies driving traffic to their companyname.jobs with their recruitment communications? One of my favorite bloggers, Colin Kingsbury recently left the comment:
“I don’t know any meaningful standard by which the new TLDs have been anything except miserable failures for everyone other than the registrars. HotJobs et. al. buy these because they want to protect their brand from squatters, not dedicate real effort to it.”
He may be right. Given my opinion that connecting and interacting with the emerging workforce is going to happen more and more on wireless devices – perhaps .jobs will never even have a chance to come in to its own.
EXCELER8ion is where Shannon and Julian Seery Gude write on Social Media & Recruiting, Digital Marketing, Technology, Internet Business, and other Geekiness. 
8 comments ↓
A year already WOW! For all the initial hype (I was included in that hype as I wrote a couple of pieces about the dot jobs TLD) not a lot has really changed. But are we really surprised?
Hi Michael – thanks for the comment.
No, I am not surprised that we have yet to see widespread adoption of the .jobs domain. Any perceived “technical change” to a corporate web site for the sake of HR is a challenge to make happen for a variety of reasons – but the one that I have encountered with greatest frequency is that HR has to work through the red tape of their IT departments. When it comes to something like .jobs – most companies have IT governed domain buying policies. Getting IT to see the value of the .jobs domain isn’t easy to accomplish either. Further complicating the situation – many large corporation use Network Solutions as their approved registrar, and NS does not sell the .jobs domain. The final straw is that the – pricing for the .jobs domain name is about 3000% higher than a normal .com; .edu or .net. Not that $150 is a large amount of money – but simply because it deviates from the norm, IT ends up being skeptical.
Despite the hurdles, I still feel that .jobs is a really good idea in theory. I read a statistic recently suggesting that it is not uncommon to lose upwards of 50% of your visitors before the home page even loads. That may or may not be an inflated metric – but we do know that you lose candidates as the number of clicks-to-action (CTA) increases i.e. the number of clicks it takes for a job seeker to find the job info they are searching for. The .jobs TDL reduces the CTA and that should result in a measurable increase in the number of candidate conversions.
Many in the recruitment marketing or recruitment technology space have brushed off .jobs as just a money maker for SHRM and EmployMedia, and admittedly, you can achieve the same “direct route to careers info” with a vanity URL – but .jobs also offers a *uniform* system for job seekers (vanity URLs tend to vary greatly – microsoftcareers.com or starbucksbarristas.com). But we obviously need to get to a place where there is general adoption of the uniform system by corporations before we will ever see job seekers begin using the extension to look for job info.
All of this for a simple domain name… no wonder there aren’t more corporate recruiting blogs out there.
As someone not involved in recruiting my initial take was that dotjobs was a good idea. I can see the difficulties involved but if it starts to grow over the next few years it may reach critical size and become ‘the way’ to get at job opportunities. Then everyone will be wondering why it wasn’t always that way.
We created a .jobs to get to our careers site though it acts as a redirect to /careers. There are a few other European-based firms doing this (see ing.jobs as an example in our industry). At the moment I’d suggest the jury is out on this. Going via the .com to the careers site is by far our biggest route. At the moment more people go via /careers than .jobs. We also own a bunch of other marketing urls of the .com/X format which we use on printed material.
Whether to go .jobs/graduates, for example, is a policy decision – at the moment I don’t see it for anything other than a redirect to cover eventualities. In terms of creating a search-engine friendly site I can’t see this happening. The real answer is ensuring the whole of .com is as search engine friendly as possible. Our sites are all created using a CMS & I’ve no appetite to duplicate work, especially given that it would be a workaround.
.Jobs real issue is that users will only use it if it is widely embraced by employers. That won’t happen unless there is evidence that users expect it. I’m comfortable at the moment with our approach. It’s not perfect but is probably the most pragmatic solution.
Hi Andrew – thanks for the comment!
The 301 redirect to the /careers portion of the corporate website is the solution that I have seen used the majority of the time since the .jobs launch as well.
I think if you are considering the .jobs/graduates – what do you think about keeping the “graduates” piece all within a TLD so – abccompanyfornewgrads.jobs for example – rather than incorporating the slash? The resulting name is long – but may be easier to remember than a slash.
I absolutely agree with you – until .jobs is adopted, used in all recruitment marketing and commonly used by employers – jobseekers will never come to expect its use.
[...] Clearly, we should leave the more foundational whys and wherefores to the real experts. You can – and should – read Shannon Seery of EXCELER8ion’s Happy Birthday Dot Jobs .jobs dot-jobs dotjobs … whatever you call it, or study Cheezhead’s comments in google (and msn) smile down on .jobs domain. For an international perspective, a nuts-and-bolts read, see Michael Specht’s posts: dot jobs is available and Fitting .JOBS Into The Marketplace and Movement in Job Search. I’m sure there are other works we should all be reading, but who knows? Researching this post has led me to conclude that in the final analysis, this is, to be sure, all hype – a wedding with no bride. [...]
We are Ireland’s largest employer of temporary and contract staff. We use the .Jobs TLDN on all our site promotion , including staff email.
The .jobs domain is great idea, but will take time. Before there was cable TV there was TV. Now there is cable TV with dedicated channels for food, sports, home improvement/decorating (HGTV), weather, news, and cartoons. With the traffic of the internet growing in specific areas (like job searches), doesn’t it make sense to know where you are traveling and where you should search? The internet is an infant with many years to grow.
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