So, recently, a friend of mine who had struggled for a long time looking for an employee, decided to send the job details to one of the many Kenyan job sites out there. They had a notice on their homepage that if you sent job details to them via email, they would post the job to an audience of thousands. They were right.
Soon, my friend’s inbox was flooded with job applicants. He’s extremely happy and cannot thank the Kenyan job sites enough. He’s still sorting through them and is certain that he will get what he needs.
This intrigued me a little and I had a deeper look at what had happened. Not only had his little job advert appeared on the site he posted too, but it had “magically” spread through Kenyan web space like you would not believe. It was suddenly on all Kenyan job sites, it seems. Big sites, small sites – they did not seem to care.
What might interest you, though, is that his ad also ‘magically’ appeared on heavy-hitters N-soko (by nation Media), Dealfish and Brighter Monday. It seems that these large sits employ someone (or perhaps a bot) to go through the other, small sites, and copy their content (at least as far as job ads go). Worse, the ad that appeared on these “heavy-hitters” was absolutely worthless to a job seeker – they had removed the contact address before posting the job ad. Can you believe that?
How would akina Dealfish gain from posting a job ad that no one can apply to? Sad truth is that they don’t really care. All that these job sites, big or small, are after is eyeballs. They want to post as many job openings as possible in hopes of attracting as many job seekers as possible. I would wager that they dont care if these job seekers actually find jobs….. they only want them to click on their little adsense adverts. And that, my friends, is business.
Of course I am not saying that anyone is doing any wrong – in fact I think that the whole system put together serves job seekers very well. As my friend learnt, it is also extremely useful for employers. At the end of the day it is just business – only at the cost of endless copying and/or plagiarism to entice job seekers and hope that they click on some adverts. This must be one of the easiest “online businesses” to start in Kenya, right?
As they say, if you get a product/service for free then think again. You are the product.