This may be a bold statement but I honestly believe some hiring managers are scared to use free resources or even new resources for all that matters because they fear that one day those resources could replace them. If they were to embrace new avenues it would only better their performance and I’m sure many investors would be ecstatic to see annual expenses decrease!

Right on their home page:

“We are a national, full-service professional and technical staffing firm…”

Ugh. I’m jaded.

First, LinkUp is absolutely a new and highly unique job search engine. We differ from Indeed and Simplyhired in a number of important ways. We only index jobs from company sites. There are absolutely no jobs on LinkUp from other job boards. Period. On occasion, we do find that we have mistakenly added a staffing company to the search engine and are indexing their jobs for their employer clients, but this is very rare and we take off those sites as soon as they are discovered.

As a result of not listing any jobs from other job boards, especially pay-to-post job boards, we do not have any fake jobs, scam jobs, work-at-home scam listings, or identity theft jobs on our site. Contrary to your mistaken belief that a pay-to-post model prevents scam jobs from appearing, it is the pay-to-post sites that scam listings use to give their jobs ‘legitimacy.’ (and by the way, if you think that a person wouldn’t pay for a scam listing, why would they be willing to set up a fake company website in the hope that LinkUp would start indexing the jobs on it?)

If you have ever spent any time on a job board of any size, you are certainly aware that the vast majority of them are plagued by scam listings. These scam artists are more than willing to pay the pay-to-post fees because they generate phenomenal returns by taking advantage unsuspecting job seekers. Unfortunately, most job boards are not capable of or are not willing to forego this revenue stream, especially in the current environment when recruitment ad revenue is as depressed as it is. And as a result, both Indeed and Simplyhired list all of these scam jobs, fake jobs, work-at-home scams, and identity theft jobs right alongside the real job listings and leave it up to the job seeker to figure out which ones are legitimate and which ones are not. That is one of the resons that those two sites have more jobs than LinkUp, because an alarmingly high percentage of them are fake jobs.

The other reason that Indeed and Simplyhired have more job listings is because they have thousands and thousands of duplicate listings. Because both Indeed and Simplyhired aggregate jobs from hundreds and hundreds of job boards, the same job can be listed multiple times if the employer is advertising their jobs on multiple sites. In fact, in a study by a hospital in Minnesota, it was discovered that some individual jobs of theirs were listed up to 27 different times on Indeed and Simplyhired. Duplicates are a massive issue for both sites, causing enormous frustration for employers and job seekers alike, while greatly inflating the number of individual jobs on Indeed and Simplyhired.

With LinkUp, there are absolutely no duplicate job listings at all because we only aggregate jobs from a single source – the employer’s company website itself.

One of the main drawbacks of our site, and one that we fully recognize, is that we are subject to the quality of the companies’ listings. If employers do not effectively manage and maintain their site, do not remove jobs that have been filled, or have technical problems with their applicant tracking system, we unfortunately will pass along that frustrating experience to our users. While we feel that these types of incidents represent a tiny fraction of the employers and job listings that we index, it is a problem that we are working diligently to overcome.

I certainly agree with your point that not all companies post their job openings on their company website. Many businesses still do not have a company website, and of those that do, many still do not have jobs listed there. Some, too, post jobs on their company site but not in a format that we can index into our job search engine. While this does prohibit us from aggregating a certain portion of available jobs in the market, that number is shrinking every month. More importantly, we are very happy to sacrifice some level of quantity in exchange for having the highest quality database of jobs on the web today.

And finally, I have no idea what you mean in your statement that LinkUp ‘seems to belong to one of those run of the mill, up by noon job boards.’ LinkUp is owned and operated by JobDig, a company that has been in the recruitment advertising business since 2001. We have spent 4 years building LinkUp and are currently indexing over 20,000 corporate websites on a daily basis. The technology involved is incredibly sophisticated, and the our user-interface is among the best in the industry. Our traffic growth over the past 12 months is among the highest in the industry, and the reviews we are receiving from around the web are overwhelmingly positive (see LinkUp.com for the complete list). This is no ‘run of the mill job board’ by any stretch of the imagination. Our success to date speaks for itself, and I would strongly encourage you to spend some time not only on our site, but on the other leading job boards online today, including Simplyhired and Indeed. I am confident that an objective review of the leading sites will result in your recognition that LinkUp stands as the best job search engine on the web today.

Also, unless you just sat on your head and got it stuck, the arguements made by the advertisement promoted above (12 Reasons) have a few flaws that don’t hold water. On one line, the author downs job boards as a source for jobs, and goes on about how LinkUp only gets jobs from company sites. However, when I did a test search, I found jobs straight from, you guesed it, a job board. In fact most of the jobs returned linked back to a particular job board. Another interesting point may be worth mentioning – the site seems to belong to one of those run of the mill, up by noon job boards the advertisement warns everone to stay away from. I’m assuming they want people to use their poor simplyhired/indeed knockoff. Just a wild guess…

Additionally, the idea that by getting jobs directly from comapany websites fake jobs are avoided is a little off anyway. Beleive it or not, fake company websites may include fake jobs in an effort to appear more legitimate. Other jobs may be real, but filled and the sites webmaster did not remove them.

Lets not forget – some real companies do not post their jobs on a company website, but instead advertise them on or offline. If a job board, like JobDig or DogPile, has alot of fake jobs, it is likely do with poor management, or even intentional fraud. Advertising price also plays a part in discouraging fake jobs since people are not likely to want to pay any significant amount to post fake jobs.

As for personal data, I doubt any ethical job site is going to risk loosing members by selling or sharing its resume database with anyone other than employers seeking candidates.

Anyway, kind of funny to read the comments made by adoring fans, most likely shills. I have to wonder if there are many people gullable enough to fall for this kind of obvious promotion. Never mind, the person, persons, or split personalities responsible for comments like “we might just be the next big thing”, or “We’re getting raving fans, one at a time” are hilarious. Smart folks are not stupid enough to buy this bull. The statement “We’re spending embarrassingly little on marketing” is probably the most accurate one made by the promoter.