profile updated Apr 15, 2008, 1:45 PM
As the third-largest career site in North America, HotJobs is a traditional job board with all expected services, plus the power of the Yahoo network, which uniquely positions HotJobs to capture the highly valued passive job seeker.
HotJobs is capitalizing on the strengths that it can draw from Yahoo’s technology and user base, giving it a competitive advantage against its rivals. With its new management team, and through its recent distribution partnerships, particularly with nearly 400 newspapers, HotJobs has seen substantial growth and is narrowing the gap against rivals CareerBuilder and Monster.
Yahoo HotJobs is the third largest career site in North America – second to CareerBuilder and Monster. After languishing and even declining in traffic and revenue after being acquired by Yahoo for $440 million in 2002 in a bidding war with Monster, HotJobs completely reversed course in 2007. Largely through Yahoo’s sales and distribution deals with almost 400 newspapers and 21 newspaper groups, traffic at HotJobs was up approximately 40 percent in 2007 alone. Because of the 500-million registered users of the Yahoo network, HotJobs has a greater potential reach than its two main competitors combined. Until recently, however, HotJobs barely mined that opportunity. Its one bright spot is the 95 million users who have signed up for targeted Yahoo. Thus, a user searching Yahoo education for advanced computer courses may receive notification of computer jobs. Yahoo also has the ability to place targeted advertisements on the Yahoo pages of all of its users, giving employers yet another way of reaching passive and active candidates. While Monster and CareerBuilder have the ability to place targeted ads on behalf of individual employers, neither one can come close to matching the ease and options that HotJobs offers. HotJobs has made a number of product improvements and changes in 2006-2007 and has entered into new arenas in job searching and candidate sourcing. It has improved the search and match technology for employers to match resumes against job postings. HotJobs has entered the mobile arena via the Yahoo Go product, which, among other things, allows candidates to view and search for jobs. It has also built an application on social networking site Facebook and is including tools on the site that enable people to email or instant-message a posting.
What a difference a year makes. Yahoo appears to have turned HotJobs around, if its growth in traffic is any indication. Expect it to continue to narrow the gap between Monster and CareerBuilder – and to make leadership among the “big three” much more of a race into 2008 and beyond.News & Updates 
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Finni-gone to Jobvite (ere)
Former Yahoo! HotJobs Dan Finnigan is the new CEO at Jobvite. Jul 1, 2008, 11:16 AM -
Announcements and Products Just In Time For The SHRM Show (ere)
With the SHRM show and conference underway in Chicago now, vendors have been busy issuing announcements of product releases, new deals, partnerships and more. Here's a roundup of items that crossed our desk over the weekend: Jun 23, 2008, 1:57 PM -
Monster Profits Slide As CEO Promises A More Aggressive Future (ere)
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Monster Partners With MSNBC In Traffic Deal (ere)
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Career Sites Fail Job Seekers (New York Times)
A study by Forrester Research released this week reported the majority of online job sites failed to pass usability and performance tests. Apr 9, 2008, 8:13 PM -
HotJobs’ Search Now Based on Relevancy (ere)
HotJobs now will present search results according to how well the job matches the jobseeker's criteria. Mar 30, 2008
Products & Services
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Job board
HotJobs offers a full suite of job board-related services. Job posting options range from a single job to unlimited, automated posting directly from company websites. It also offers resume database access, premium placement and distribution and more. Of the three major job boards, HotJobs offers the lowest entry price, $219 for a 30 day listing, depending on the locale. -
HotJobs Direct
Ability to advertise and reach out to passive job seekers. With HotJobs direct, employers can send targeted email to up to 95 million Yahoo users who have opted in to receive such communication. HotJobs also offers several options to deliver targeted advertising to up to 500 million Yahoo users, based on specific criteria.