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.

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.

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.