Just because, Eric Shannon is launching JustJobs today.
It’s a jobs search engine in the vein of an Indeed and SimplyHired, though Shannon will insist, with some justification, that it’s not just another clone. Instead, if you notice similarities to Craigslist, that would please him.
“I’ve been a fan for many years,” says the founder and president of LatPro. “It’s simple.”
JustJobs isn’t as comprehensive as the other aggregators. It works with partners who provide direct feeds or who request that their jobs be scraped (captured) directly from their site. In either case the sites partner with JustJobs, which won’t unilaterally send automated programs online to search out and collect job listings.
“It’s all partner focused,” Shannon tells us. And it’s all free. The site will make money by participating in Google’s AdSense, an advertising program that pays site operators a small portion of the per-click fee it charges advertisers. AdSense revenue is beer and pizza money, unless the site has millions and millions of pageviews. Even then, the revenue is supplemental.
Shannon, though, isn’t in it for the money. “I’ve been looking for a way to provide more value for more people,” he says. This project, he says, is a way to build traffic for niche boards, while providing job seekers an easy way to find geographically focused jobs that are unlikely to show up on a major job board.
Like Craigslist (well, sort of like Craigslist), JustJobs lists several major cities and geographical regions. Click into one and the address becomes JobsinKansascity.org or IndependenceJobs.org. Each locale gets its own URL.
Other sites have taken the same approach. The Beyond.com network has 15,000 job sites including geographic and industry focused. While it can be a useful approach, the big question we had was: “Does the world really need another job search engine?”
Shannon is investing his own money in the project — a labor of love this year, he agreed, but one with business options, he says, when the economy rebounds, as it eventually will. “One of the advantages I have is my time horizon is 10 years, 15, maybe 20 years. I have time on my side,” he explains.
Because he doesn’t have to satisfy investors, he can take his time to build traffic and the business. He did that with LatPro and later with DiversityJobs. Taking that approach with JustJobs, Shannon told us, “I expect that in five years we will be in the top five (of the aggregators); maybe three years.”
But with Indeed and SimplyHired doing a good enough job to have propelled themselves into the top ranks of job boards already, why launch another one?
“It’s a very philosophical question,” he mused, saying a simple answer wasn’t really possible. Monday morning Shannon emailed us to say the launch was a go for this morning, and to say he had thought about the question over the weekend.
“Thought more about your question ‘why does the world need another job search engine?’ and I think a good answer is that as long as the search engine results are cram(med) full of job search predators, my job is not finished!”