However, if employers have their own career site (and many do) and behind that career site they have their applicant tracking systems et al then ideally they want to drive applications through that site. So the Yahoo model is “close but no cigar” in that what they really want to do is spider the corporates direct and cut-out the large job boards in between, and then the revenue model is simple for Yahoo â€" the same as their traditional â€" “pay for position”. Spidering a job board is easy, the data is in a consistent format and to get a large number of jobs is easy â€" for each country simply pick the top 3-4 job boards and bingo â€" a global database. Again, there is a problem with this â€" not all the jobs are there â€" a lot of well-known major corporates don’t need to advertise on job boards as the correct job-seekers know to come to their website direct.

Following on from this the market will split into two camps:

a) those who want to use yahoo, google etc to simply drive the traffic to their careers website and handle everything from there (try searching for jobs on google at the moment and it’s a poor response, so that's why they need to follow the spidering model)

b) those who want a third party to do everything: drive the traffic, host their branded careers site, do the applicant tracking, etc

And there’s a reason why Google isn’t already there â€" spidering corporates direct is hard, we should know â€" it took us substantial resources to get to exactly this model in Germany and the UK. As to “job-boards are dead” – taking one of google’s earlier forays into the vertical market Froogle has not been a raging success and killed the other price comparison sites, so maybe even the traditional job boards will be around for some time yet.

Jens Hagendorff http://www.worldwidejobs.com

Most users aren't going to be able to tell anything beyond the representations of "X millions of jobs searched/indexed" about scope. I don't believe, for many of the reasons you state, that any site can be comprehensive.

So then the question is: how do these sites position themselves and compete against one another?

My only point is that Yahoo is a brand consumers trust. If Yahoo doesn't deliver or if there are more/better jobs elsewhere other competitiors will win.

According to comScore Media Metrix is the third ranked U.S. jobs site, behind CareerBuilder and Monster.