Catching up on HotJobs meta search

Some quick context… last October, I wrote on the future of classified listings. One of the six points:

“Cheaper… or P4P: The days of $3000 job listings, $500 car listings, etc is over, regardless of how many media types and how much room (#1, above) I want to use. Those who lack the cost structure (i.e., newspapers) and fortitude to compete at free, low or pay-for-performance price points will suffer. ”

In January of this year, I wrote about the coming disruption in classifieds, particularly around employment/recruitment. A couple of points:

“Imagine an open database of these listings that you can search… and the ability to subscribe to a Feed containing continuously updated search results… Rather than paying hundreds of dollars to list a job (house, car, etc) at Monster, CareerBuilder or HotJobs, employers (i.e., companies, recruiters, etc) can simply publish their openings (for free) as Feeds and immediately make them available to a worldwide audience, who can conveniently subscribe to them directly (or via the aforementioned searchable aggregated database).”

I’m very encouraged by this move by Yahoo/HotJobs. They are the clear laggard of the top 3 recruitment sites, and are the only ones who are (currently) well positioned for a marketplace that will move to a CPC/CPA model in the future. (To put it another way, they may have just announced their willingness to take the market there, to the chagrin of Monster and CareerBuilder.)

Moreover, their focus on building their internals as platform components/layers (as seems to be clear from their integration of “Yahoo 360’s social networking” into My Web 2.0) means that we should expected continued integration and (drum roll) “synergy” between various pieces of Yahoo’s network…