It’s easy to criticize all the opportunistic online career businesses — they are everywhere and they’re obvious. So, is every career-related site online worthless, crooked or just plain dog doo?

Of course not. There’s some good stuff online. I regularly try to point you to sites that publish non-career content that I think can be used to advance your career. Now I’m gonna show you a job board — yes, a job board — that’s worth using. I know that no matter how often I recommend using personal contacts to find jobs, many of you will use job boards anyway. So you might as well be smart about it and use a board that actually does what it claims to do: show you real job listings from real companies, and nothing else.

LinkUp is a new job board with some interesting features. Most interesting is what LinkUp does not do. Here’s the FAQ:

Where do LinkUp job listings come from?
Directly from employers. LinkUp does not accept jobs from third parties. You know: multi-level-marketing operators, recruiters who work in dank basements in unincorporated countries, and those iron-curtain identity thieves. All LinkUp job listings come from employers.

How does LinkUp get its job postings?
It uses spiders to gather real job postings only from real companies. LinkUp does not scrape jobs from other job boards (oops… that’s what the other job boards do). LinkUp doesn’t ask permission to gather the jobs, but no company has ever complained that LinkUp is doing it. LinkUp adds a company’s jobs without charging the company. So if a job is out there on a company web site, you get access to it in one place.

How fresh are the listings?
As fresh as last night. LinkUp gathers jobs and updates its listings every night. If there’s a dead listing in there, it’s because a company itself left the job on its own jobs pages on its own site. (Hey, there’s no law against dumb companies.)

How does LinkUP do that?
Really good programmers and staff who work late.

What happens to my personal data when I apply for a job on LinkUp?
This is what I really like about LinkUp. You don’t fill out forms on LinkUp and LinkUp has no job database or resume database or application database. You find the posting on LinkUp and LinkUp sends you directly to the employer’s web site. Anything you submit goes to the employer, not to LinkUp. (LinkUp cannot control whether an employer might outsource its job-board database to Monster or one of the other boards, but that’s not under anyone’s control but the employer’s. Keep your eyes open anywhere you go. All LinkUp does is let you find a real company’s real jobs on the company’s own site.) This is as clean as a job board is gonna get. If you want better service, use personal contacts to find a job.

Will LinkUp find me a job?
No, Dopey. You do that yourself. What I like about LinkUp is that it won’t find you a ton of detritus that’s been lying around some job board’s database for six years. And it doesn’t let dirt-bag “recruiters” dump their trash into your results page.

Can you guarantee me no problems and that this is legit?
Have you ever heard me guarantee you anything? I don’t. LinkUp was started by GL Hoffman, a guy I’ve worked with and known a long time. If he’s pulling my leg, I’ll never buy him another beer. And when have you ever seen me recommend a job board, anyway?

How does LinkUp make money?
Always follow the money. LinkUp pays me nothing and I don’t pay LinkUp anything. Ever hear of Google? You know those search results up top on the Google page, the ones in the shaded box above the rest of the results? Those are results an advertiser is paying for, but you know that. Like Google, LinkUp puts some paid job listings at the top of its search results, too. But they’re not ads; they’re job listings like all the rest that you’ll see, and they match your search criteria. (They have a colored background so you know what they are.) But if someone clicks on them LinkUp earns some money.

What’s LinkUp going to charge me to searchfor jobs?
Nothing. It’s free for job hunters. It’s free for companies, too, unless they want a couple of their jobs up top in the highlighted section of the results.

Yah, sure. But what does it cost for PLATINUM service when I’m looking for a job?
There is no platinum service, gold service, or anything for a job hunter to buy from LinkUp. They don’t sell resume-writing services, or career coaching, or your information to third parties. It’s free. No catch. LinkUp makes money from companies that want their jobs highlighted in search results.

Well, this doesn’t sound like a job board any more.
LinkUp is not a job board. I called it a job board to get your attention. LinkUp is a search engine that finds jobs on companies’ own web sites.

That’s it. Try it and let me know what you think. If you find a bug, it’s because the geniuses at LinkUp keep tweaking it to make it go faster and to find results more accurately. And if you find something that really bugs you, say so and I’ll dangle a beer to get GL to come over here and answer your question.

17 Comments
  1. Hi Nick,

    Could you tell me if this is any different or better than indeed.com?

    If you go to indeed’s advanced job search you can hit the ‘Show jobs from…’ drop box and select ‘Employer web sites only’ to filter out the junk.

    Did LinkUp just cut out the extra step or is there more to it that I am missing?

    Thanks,

    Jennifer

  2. The Canadian equivalent is http://www.eluta.ca

  3. Nick – Nice article, thanks for letting everyone know about LinkUp.

    Jennifer, you’re right, indeed does offer something similar, however there is a difference — LinkUp collects more jobs from more company websites. If you a search in any of the following cities and limit your search by a 25 mile radius, here are the results…

    Indeed LinkUp
    Minneapolis 2,751 3,716
    Chicago 6,705 7,272
    Los Angeles 6,574 8,935
    Nashville 1,170 2,335
    Jasksonville 1,209 1,463
    Omaha 802 975

  4. Well, I got my current gig as a contractor working for a consulting firm through a job board. About 7 or 8 months ago, I was surfing on http://careerlink.com/ to do a bit of market research, getting ideas of what might be available, companies hiring (yes, they list companies), etc. I came across an ad that seemed perfect, and it allowed me to apply to the company, so I figured what the heck, and I applied online. I got the gig, now I’m a regular contractor with the firm and pretty happy about it. This is my tenth programming position in three cities, and I believe it’s the first I actually found on a job board (though not a pay board – I’d never dream of using one of those). So, that’s only a 10% hit rate in my case (I found most of my positions either through headhunters or personal contact, with two that were in the newspaper).

    Basically, I’m of the opinion that if I ever do search online for a job (which is seldom to begin with), I’ll only use a board that is free, doesn’t store my resume (or submission is optional, in which case I decline), and allows me to apply straight to the company. LinkUp sounds like the kind of board I’d use, if I was in the market for a job again.

  5. Nick, I enjoyed reading this – it’s a fresh perspective and you have a way with words.

    I just re-checked linkup.com on compete.com and can see a fresh jump in traffic. As a result, I replaced my own diversityjobs.com with linkup.com in the bottom five of the top 10 job search engines at http://www.internetinc.com/job-search-engines

    thanks,
    eric

  6. Thank you for the link,
    I always enjoy Domino Application (yes I do)
    and right, it is always good to find reduced noise applications.
    Can they survive with just the advertising, well will see…

  7. I was just giving linkup.com as a job board to search two days ago and haven’t been to careerbuilder nor monster since.

  8. Ok, I’m gonna cry foul on this one. Nothing new. The only thing new looks like the wobbly spin. Clearly a rip of SimplyHired and indeed, both of which offer more features and more importantly – m o r e j o b s. I know both of these job search sites do also fetch jobs directly from company websites in addition to job boards.

    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.

  9. The listings are OLD and some are not jobs at all but culled keywords from “about” pages.

  10. Amy – I’ll state up front that I am President & CEO of LinkUp, so my comments are obviously biased, but there are a number of flaws in your comments.

    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.

    • Nick, and whoever else might still reading this particular Q&A topic,

      I have an update. Linkup.com is now exactly the OPPOSITE of what Mr. Dayton described in his post above: loaded with body shop job listings (just search for “staffing agency” and you can find them faster); new IT technology job listings appear to have stopped 3 or 4 months ago, the rest appear to have been auto-renewed by linkup.com, some are actually up to 9+ months old (while displaying “today” or just a few days old). Many “legitimate” listings turn out to have invalid “apply” URLs. linkup.com unreachable via email. All this while their web site still boasts about connecting directly with employers and no “old, duplicated, or spammy listings.”

      Listings contain misleading URLs since some staffing agencies listings appear to be directing you to the employer, but the ATS is really run by the agency (appears similar to customized Taleo workday.com, and similar used by larger companies). The staffing agencies’ listings at linkup.com often turn out to be bogus.

      Analytic data appears to be one of linkup.com’s other “live” products (Eagle Alpha announced a partnership in 2019 based on this data). But with linkup.com’s quality deteriorated to worse than the other job boards, they don’t appear to have much to sell.

      Mr. Dayton appeared to have hedged his bets in the job-seeker-centric market and also founded JobDig, an employer-centric search engine. While linkup.com was attracting and promoting job-seeker content, JobDig was publishing articles about how to get rid of troublesome employees. JobDig’s web site is gone, and their other bits of web presence apparently stopped in 2016. All that’s left of linkup.com’s web presence appears to be strategically placed fluff that’s been repeated many times by people who haven’t actually used this service. Stick a fork in these two, they’re done.

      linkup.com at one time was better than average with real employer’s job listings, but now appears to be near death. Can’t say that it’s on life support, ‘cause someone’s turned off the lights and closed and locked the ER.

  11. JobCab is a job search engines that uses feeds to show job listings but also has its own individual job boards that employers and recruiters can post jobs directly, based on the niche.

  12. No staffing companies? “Kelly & Thomas Associates” (www.kellythomas.net) showed up in my search results as “Opened 157 days ago — Verified 29 hours ago”

    Right on their home page:

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

    Ugh. I’m jaded.

  13. Very cool article. There are some great job boards out there: Linkup, very cool…InovaHire.com, very cool! The “Top/Big” job boards have laid out a great example of what a job board shouldn’t. It will be interesting to see where this industry ends up a few years down the road!

  14. @Tanya: The issue isn’t how lousy the job boards are and where they will end up. The issue is HR departments that feed those boards. The boards would not exist were it not for the addicted HR executives who pour money into them and prop them up. And the question is, where is the board of directors at each of those companies where HR mindlessly dumps investors’ cash into the job boards?

  15. It is very true. I am a Co-Founder of InovaHire.com and you would be amazed at the response we get when we tell HR managers our job board is free. You would think we offended them by not asking for hundreds to thousands of dollars!! Companies should be investing their money into their company and their employees, not into unnecessary hiring costs.

    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!

  16. Thanks for the informative article. I definitely agree that some hiring managers are scared to use free resources.