In April 2005, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) board of directors approved a new top-level domain –  .jobs.

EmployMedia, sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), had hoped to get corporate attention by creating a space devoted to posting and recruiting for job opportunities (i.e., Microsoft.jobs or IBM.jobs).  The experts and re-sellers lined up.

Tom Embrescia, chairman of .jobs, said “Once established, .jobs will do three things to make the current recruiting process better,””It’ll make the recruitment process simpler for companies to recruit; it’ll make recruiting uniform for all companies; and that means that job seekers will find the jobs faster, and companies will be able to more quickly fill open positions.”

Fast forward 3 years to the Spring of 2008, at a Recruiting Conference.  .jobs participated in the vendor exhibit hall – touting candidates don’t want to take the time to find a companies career page.  Here is how busy the booth was…

Fast forward 15 months to today.  While one might think yourcampany.jobs might be easy for job seekers to remember, it is not mainstream and doesn’t hold much value.  There are many reasons for the lack of adoption, here are 10:

1. Job seekers typically don’t search for jobs by a companies name, most have turned to a search engine and perform a location + function + jobs /careers search.
2. The upside the “experts” talked about for using .jobs domain name over a .com/careers domain never really came true.  There is no need for an organization to brand .jobs when it is more valuable and just as easy to brand a .com extension on their existing site.
3. .jobs was touted by the “experts” as the next best thing.  It might have been popular in the recruiting world for awhile, but candidates never found out about it, and that’s what matters the most.
4. Just having a .jobs name does not help with SEO in anyway.
5. For most companies, their jobs are still hidden behind Applicant Tracking Systems firewalls
6. .jobs was over-regulated, and very limited.
7. Employers alone can’t socialize a trend like this on their own – therefore the candidate world didn’t (and won’t) adopt it as a way to search.
8. By not giving out the .jobs domain to job boards, etc (which drives new industry adoption) – they severely limited the exposure of the domain by the segment of the industry that would have paid the most money to brand the domain type.
9. The .jobs launch was lost in all of the noise with other extensions.
10. Job seekers don’t need more confusion added to an already cumbersome process.

The “experts” were wrong, their predictions never came true.  It didn’t make the recruiting process better for candidates.  It didn’t make the process easier for companies to recruit.  And, it didn’t allow candidates to find jobs more quickly – enabling companies to fill their positions faster!

And, while there were a few success stories with .jobs, it does hold some value if used for more than a page or site re-director, albeit limited and not worth the investment given where we are at today with job seeker behaviors and recruiting technology.

My thoughts…  R.I.P. .jobs!