Michael Specht

At the beginning of April 2005 the board of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees the top level domains for the Internet, approved a new Top Level Domain (TLD) .jobs (dot jobs). The dot jobs domain has been sponsored the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and administered through an organisation called EmployMedia with all technical functionality being provided by VeriSign. The new domain is designed for organisations to direct job seekers directly to thier career board by placing the company name in front of the dot, for example if your company name was “XYZ Marketing” the new domain would be xyzmarketing.jobs. SHRM announced at this annual conference that as of June 19th 2005 registration for the new dot jobs TLD began, registrars who are providing this service can be found on the EmployMedia web site at http://www.employmedia.com/apply.html. The specific details of how this new domain operates is important for several reasons.

The domain has been created to help facilitate the recruitment process within organisations. It will be easier for job seekers to find your jobs without the need to navigate through your corporate web site or type in long URLs that are sometimes confusing and can be easy to type incorrectly. In addition to job postings the policy controlling the use of the domain allows you to include any HR related information about your company under the domain.

Search engines typically provide a higher ranking within their results for specialised domains, this is why university and other educational bodies typically rank high in search results. This is unlike the process currently undertaken with dot com and dot net addresses due to the loose registration process of the domain name further the content of the domain name does not greatly influence the results. With the strict controls around the dot jobs domain it is expected that search engines will treat this new domain in a similar fashion to educational domains and rank them higher. Making it easier for job seekers to find jobs of interest to them through the traditional search engines without the need to use a job board services.

Over the last 6 months there has been the growth in a new type of search engines called “vertical search” these tools crawl the Internet, essentially finding job posting and aggregating the content to provide a simple search environment for job seekers regardless of where the job posting exists. Once the job seeker selects a job they are redirected back to the original publisher. This process will become a lot more efficient and usable with the introduction of the new domain. It is expected that vertical search engines will start their aggregation with the new dot jobs domains.

SHRM has put together some strict rules around who can register for the domain, essentially you need to be an HR professional. This process is designed to stop the cyber-squatting that took place in the 1990’s with the growth in dot com addresses, a situation that did not eventuate in Australia due to the registration rules around dot com dot au. This process will protect organisations from the unscrupulous people who might want to hijack your good brand name for other means.

While the policies for allocation are fairly clear there are still many issues that need to be resolved by corporations going forward. Most US based organisations struggle to provide consistent recruiting approaches to all countries around the globe. Microsoft is a good example, but not the only one. The corporate careers site is at http://www.microsoft.com/careers, the Australian/New Zealand site is at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/careers/. Are we going to end up with microsoft.jobs and microsoft.jobs/australia? If you work for a global organisation the time to act is now to ensure that a consistent policy globally is created. The domain registration process is global and as such any company with your name can register a dot jobs address. For example the National Australia Bank one of the largest banks in Australia has the domain national.com.au, however if you look at national.com you end up at National Semiconductors in the US. The first organisation to register national.jobs gets to keep the domain. By registering early you will prohibit this from happening. Otherwise job seekers might have to learn new domains just to see the careers site, nationalaustraliabank.jobs, or your organisation will be adversely impacted over the long term.

You will not need to create a whole new site for the new domain, your existing careers site will be sufficient, if you do not have a careers site now is the time to build one. From a technical perspective it is very easy for IT professionals who mange you existing web sites to ensure that the new dot jobs domain points to your careers pages. Initially you could keep both approaches the traditional xyzmarketing.com.au/careers and the new xyzmarketing.jobs that would automatically direct users to the existing careers page. This way you can implement the changes rapidly and have the IT group clean up the old structure at a later date.

There are a mixture of views as to if the new domain will have an impact of the recruitment process and if organisations need to concern themselves with the domain at all. Some commentators feel that this new domain is just a method for registrars to generate additional revenue from the expected millions potential organisations who will register world wide. Further several new TLDs have been added in the last few years with varying success (dot info as an example), if you are in the business of recruiting you should certainly investigate how this new domain will impact your organisation.

The challenge for recruiters and hiring managers is going to be to keep up with the changes over the next 12 months to ensure that their recruiting strategy incorporates all of these new developments. Remember if you are interested registration has begun and you can find a list of valid registrars at http://www.employmedia.com/apply.html.

Links fo Interest
http://www.specht.com.au/michael/2005/04/13/more-on-dot-jobs/
http://careerxroadsannex.blogspot.com/2005/04/dot-jobs-approved-watershed-event.html
http://cheesman.typepad.com/seo/2005/04/jobs_domain_is_.html
http://www.circleid.com/article/1123_0_1_0_C/

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