Job Board Data Pollution: How Duplication Bloats the Labor Market (Part 2)

Cue the heavenly choirs: a new job is born.

Your sales team is growing; a lifer retired; there’s new technology to untangle; someone needs an associate to lighten the load. However it happened, now comes the hard part. Hiring for it.

You post the job to the career page on your company’s website. Here, your team can monitor engagement from candidates directly and edit or remove the listing as the need arises. One listing for one job, an organic post; accuracy and simplicity united. But there’s a problem–you’re not getting any clicks.

So you hire a recruitment agency to boost your exposure. They present an advertising strategy that leverages job boards, aggregators, social media, email campaigns, and automated programming. Your listing will be seen by millions. You’re on your way to a promised land of resumes. But for job market analysts, you’ve just opened Pandora’s box.

That one, beautiful, organic job listing is about to multiply like bacteria.

To see how duplication happens at scale, let’s follow the money.

Company X pays a recruitment agency to extend the reach of their single job listing. Generally they pay either against each candidate click the ad generates or for the duration of the ad. Recently, job boards have experimented with pay-per-applicant and pay-per-hire models, but to little success.

Since it captures the largest number of job ad dollars in the U.S., we’ll take the pay-per-click model as our example. Say Company X agrees to pay its agency $1 for every click it generates. First, the agency posts the listing to its own job search engine, which has somewhat more reach than the company’s website. Not so bad, right? Well, here come the job boards.

Recruiters pay job boards per click, too. But where the recruiter’s making $1, they’ll pay each job board a marginal fee, say 50 cents per click, and before you know it the listing is syndicated to 100 job boards. But it doesn’t stop there. Those boards will then syndicate the job listing further downstream to other job boards, often more niche and less monitored, for a smaller sliver still of the ad dollar. This cascade of syndication no doubt generates clicks for the client, but it also produces stunning caches of duplicate listings.

More troubling is that these same job boards will scrape vast feeds of job listings from each other, using 3rd-party job content as backfill to supplement their own listings and increase the apparent depth and breadth of their job openings.

Meanwhile, some job boards aren’t job boards at all, but rather well-disguised passthrough advertising schemes. Populated entirely with scraped jobs, these job aggregators buy traffic (clicks into their site) from other sources and then sell traffic (redirects to other job boards) for a marginal profit. There are literally thousands of job boards that operate this way–serving no real audience and adding no real value.

All this syndication can only happen at the scale demanded by today’s advertisers with automation. Programmatic job advertising, an increasingly prized tactic of recruiters, leverages machine learning to purchase media space for job ads. Essentially, it automates the process outlined above, determining which job boards and other platforms to publish on. Since the ascent of programmatic advertising, we’ve seen duplication, a serious problem to begin with, exacerbated by a factor of 15x.

This gigantic sandstorm of cross-syndication has yanked Company X’s single organic listing through the funhouse hall of mirrors that is online job boards, duplicated it ruthlessly–and worse–distorted it, too. Job syndication is an imperfect technology and it often generates faulty copies of the original listing, frequently mistranslating the location, salary, application process, and other details of the job.

So where does this MADNESS leave us?

Company X will get thousands of clicks on its listing. It will likely be flooded with applications, one of which will lead to a hire. But the costs here are steep, both to the marketing budget and the company’s employment brand. It’s also incredibly annoying for job-seekers, who have to wade through huge swells of duplicative and outdated information on job boards. But this we’ll have to leave for a future post.

It’s great for job boards. The more listings they appear to offer on their platforms, the more applicants they’ll attract, who in turn will entice employers and recruiters to invest where the pot looks hot. And, as many of the leading job boards are recalibrating themselves into data farms, they’re betting that quantity beats quality in the data marketplace. This is the primary reason job boards are unlikely to solve the problem of duplication–it’s too damn lucrative for their business model.

But duplication is terrible; downright freaking horrendous for job data. On this journey down the duplication stream, we’ve watched one actual job multiply into dozens if not hundreds of apparent job listings. This is happening every day, across the internet, on every job board–of which there are over 25,000.

When job boards sell their data to analysts they don’t sift the real jobs intending to hire from all the other crapola the sites house, like the fraudulent listings discussed in our last post and the duplicate listings outlined here. It all comes mixed together in one giant, noxious data gumbo.

Our message is clear: job market data collected from job boards is bad data. It’s bloated with pollutants and blaring false signal. It distorts trend analysis and enervates predictive power.

LinkUp’s unique approach takes us back to the beginning of our story, to the new job posted on a company’s website. Because that’s the only place we draw our job data from: a company’s website, over 60,000 of them, every day. It’s as close to the source as you can get. It’s immune to the forces of fraud and duplication that drive the chaos of the job board ecosystem. And it’s the most reliable possible indicator of a company’s intent to hire.

Sick of polluted signal? Clean up your job data with LinkUp.

Job Board Data Pollution Blog Series:

Job Board Data Pollution: An Introduction

Job Board Data Pollution: The Nefarious Underworld of Fake Jobs (Part 1)

Job Board Data Pollution: Expired Listings Slow Data Down (Part 3)

What’s in a Job Listing? The LinkUp Difference