Back around the turn of the century a novel career search Web site was created. It was called Flipdog.com. It “spidered” employer (and our) web sites grabbing jobs and making them available for searching. It quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of jobs and became one of the most popular career Web sites. In about 5 years after it’s creation, it was DEAD!

What happened? Flipdog.com was very popular with job seekers. It listed jobs from almost all major companies and a surprising number of smaller companies. It was even pretty easy to find jobs. It had a decent user interface. It listed our jobs for free so we liked it.

Flipdog.com was never able to capitalize (monetize) on its popularity. Why? Because a lot of companies didn’t want to mess around with paying a premium price to get their jobs at the top of the free listings. They figured that Flipdog.com should just grab and post their jobs for free and that should be the end of it. An interesting thing would happen when companies saw that similar companies were listed for free but their jobs weren’t listed. They’d call Flipdog.com and ask to be listed. They then got a sales pitch about the virtues of paying to be on the top of lists. In the end, if your company was lucky, your jobs were listed for free.

Monster bought Flipdog.com. Now, the big Monster gave Flipdog.com about a year to make lots of money. It didn’t happen. Monster “rebranded” Flopdog.com into oblivion. We received many desperate phone calls from Flipdog.com employees after the purchase trying to come up with some way to get us to pay for the listings. We never quite bought into it. It looks like the rest of the market didn’t either, so Monster let those hard working people go.

Flipdog.com was the first superstar of job listing vertical search Web sites. Since the demise of Flipdog.com a multitude of descendants have risen from the ashes. It turns out that the technology to grab jobs off employer Web sites is pretty simple. Now, they are all trying to figure out how to make money. Currently, the model is to grab jobs from career and employer Web sites and sell top of page listings somewhat like what Flipdog.com did. The only difference is that companies bid for top placement. This can result in a bidding war taking a lot of valuable time for recruiters making sure their jobs are on the top of search results.

Some of the more popular vertical search engines include: Indeed.com, Simplyhired.com, Oodle.com and TopUSAJobs.com. Also, Google has a place to post free jobs. Google will, of course grab jobs off Web sites if they are made easily accessible and put them in thier general (organic) search results. Hotjobs is also grabbing jobs and placing them in a vertical search results section.

We love vertical search engines. We have our jobs listed on all the big ones. We even bid to have our client’s jobs appear above other similar jobs. MinnesotaJobs.com is in the Internet marketing business so this is just another tool for us to help our clients reach the best job seekers (passive and active). We’re not sure if the current business model of vertical search will work in the long run. But, we are embracing it on behalf of our clients thus saving them the time and effort of setting up the partnerships, writing the software to format data the vertical search engines can use and bidding on job placements of search results. This and all the other partnerships we have established in the Internet and traditional media worlds makes your recruiting dollar go farther then it ever has before.