No doubt it will be news to you that as of the 9th September, recruitment “Job board”/aggregator Jora has ceased trading in New Zealand. This will be news to you because Jora was so inconsequential that many of you will never have heard of it. And I’m certain none of you will have ever paid them any money. Let me kill some word count by explaining what is was, and why it was rubbish. Jora was founded in 2012 in Melbourne as a job search aggregator – not a job board in the traditional sense, but a site that scraped and aggregated listings from across the web and other job boards. This was back when things like this seemed like a good idea. Interweb “directories” were a “thing” and being eyed-up as legitimate acquisition channels. Think of Jora as the Google of job searching rather than a destination site like SEEK. A middleman that could beat SEEK to the SEO punch. SEEK, who have some sense but even more money, actually invested in it, which tells you everything about the strategy – if you’re not sure of what something is or the threat it poses, buy it. Unlike SEEK, who make money by selling us job listings, Jora just clipped the ticket. It pulled jobs from everywhere and sent candidates back to the source to apply. It had no direct relationship with employers, and no direct applications. Revenue came from cost-per-click, not job ad fees. In essence, they needed commercial arrangements with actual destination job boards, who’d pay them a few cents for traffic sent their way. To bulk out the site, a large chunk of Jora’s listings were effectively free inventory – scraped content that made the site look full and useful and popular to candidates, but generated no revenue. The paying customers (probably just SEEK) were subsidising the appearance of a much bigger, more comprehensive product than the commercial relationships actually supported. What a f*cking depressing way to make a living.
Of course, this is nothing that Google won’t now do for free. So Jora tried to be a proper job board, but they’re owned by SEEK, and would never have the money or brand to compete (hint: no one does). So, this month, Jora closed all international operations and only exists in Australia and only as an aggregator. And probably not for very long.
Scraping jobs is, in the opinion of an opinionated recruitment blogger, sh*t. Indeed once made a business of it, but with the funding of Recruit Holdings (Japan), are desperately trying to be a “proper” destination job board themselves. Being an aggregator puts you at the mercy of the biggest job board in the market. If they play hard-ball, you are royally f*cked. But to these people, like the Nazis, Communists, and those of us who bleach our bumholes, the end justifies the means. Thieving IP sends traffic to legitimate jobs. This is good right? Well yes, but no. Not at all.
We’ve seen the same thing here in Aotearoa. Kiwi job board Zeil have openly scraped jobs from SEEK and TradeMe without permission. Jobs which someone wrote, edited, sorted out the weird spacing, and pestered their marketing person for a non-blurry logo in the correct format for. And then paid a job board for them to post. Zeil take this ad and post in on their platform. The author and creator of this ad isn’t asked before it goes live. They don’t get to see if the logo is wonky or if AI has been used. This is (incredibly) justified by Zeil because “Job aggregation is a common practice across the recruitment industry, but our focus is on making sure employers are aware, supported and in control of how their opportunities appear. As part of our process, we contact employers to let them know their role has been shared, invite them to review the listing and their candidates free of charge, and give them the option to manage or remove the listing”. Why would Zeil do such a thing? Well according to them, “job listing procurement” was designed to give small and medium-sized businesses additional visibility and free access to Zeil’s hiring tools. So there we have it. Absolutely no commercial interest in it for them. No need to increase listings or steal traffic from job boards that did it properly. Just a burning desire to help small kiwi business for absolutely no reward. Of course!
Zeil aren’t the only ones to do it, and I treat any company that scrapes jobs with the same distaste and mistrust. These firms always then boast around the number of listings they have, which is the most ridiculous vanity metric you could ever judge a business by. How many listings have you actually sold? Tell us that. Otherwise you’re just showing off the expensive jewellery you stole. To a policeman. If the above statement from Zeil is true and indicative of why struggling job boards do this, then how about winning business the old fashioned way? Like what us recruiters do? How about picking up the phone and saying “We saw your ad on SEEK. We’ll run it for free. We can even copy and paste it right now. If it works, maybe you’ll pay us next time?”. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? When us recruiters advertise a role that we haven’t been briefed on, we are rightly hung out to dry. The client whose role we “scraped” would never use us again. And yet, according to an unnamed spokesperson “Job aggregation is a common practice across the recruitment industry”. So there’s a line I suggest you trot out to an enraged GM of HR.
Scraping a job ad and claiming it’s altruistic is nonsense. Imagine selling your home via Harcourts, and then walking past Barfoot & Thompson and seeing your house in its window. Pics of your living room. The saccharine description of the suburb. The shameless boast around school zones. You would no doubt be somewhat perturbed. And when Barfoot & Thompson say “Oh don’t worry. We don’t want anything. We’re just promoting it. Because we’re good like that“, you would call “bullsh*t”. You’d be correct. They’re either doing it because they’re padding the feeble number of legitimate listing they have, or they’re going to come to you with a buyer. All you have to do is sign the contract. Sound familiar?
Have a good weekend.
^SW
