There’s spam. There’s trademark theft. And there’s just plain ridiculousness. A site I came across recently fulfills all three criteria. Meet EndeededJobs.com.
EndeededJobs. Not at all like Indeed.
The site says, “We are the newest Job Search site. We always have jobs hiring Now, changing occupations is easy. Search our site for millions of Job Postings and Career opportunities. Your sure to find your dream full time or part time Job here.”
It claims to be a Jobs4Days subsidiary. Heading over to Jobs4Days is pretty much a carbon copy of EndeededJobs with more affiliate banner ads.
Not surprisingly, the domains are registered privately, so revealing the owner is a bit out of my jurisdiction. It’s registered under GoDaddy, however, so I’m sure a cease-and-desist from Indeed would get it pulled pretty quickly. Ironically, the Jobs4Days site has an Indeed banner ad on it.
The site uses ZipRecruiter’s API to serve its jobs to users. The owner gets paid when clicks occur. If Indeed doesn’t get this garbage taken out, I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone at ZipRecruiter pull this site’s API access.
I found the site after doing some investigation into Twitter, which says it’s going to start deleting millions of accounts that are fake in the coming days. Inevitably, this will impact a lot of job boards that spam Twitter with postings on a mass scale. The tweet promoting EndeededJobs was an account called Dallas Deal Finder. Check it out.
Oooh, This Indeed Ripoff Even Has a Logo
Of course, there are a ton of these deal finder accounts on Twitter promoting EndeededJobs, driving traffic to it. One of the Twitter accounts, Denver Deal Finder, has been penalized by Twitter, and I assume the others will be gone soon too. Well done, Twitter. The network of accounts looks like it’s run by a guy named Alex Stojkovic, who claims to be a marketing guru and founder of a Toronto deal site, which is basically spamming Twitter.
The site is obviously trying to confuse job seekers, hoping they’ll mistake it for Indeed and automatically trust its content. The site asks for an email address, but I’m not signing up for “alerts.” It’s easy to just dismiss this stuff, but doing so hurts the industry as a whole.
The good news is spam like this is going away. Google filters these kinds of sites out of it’s index pretty easily now, especially via Google for Jobs. Social media, and particularly Twitter, is the last bastion of traffic generation these folks have, and that’s going away soon too. Wait, I take that back, smartphone app stores are still a pretty safe place to hide, for now anyway.
