Review: Linkup
Toby Dayton is one of the industry’s least known, most effective entrepreneurs. JobDig, his first offering, is the midwest’s parallel to the Southwest’s Jobing. JobDig delivers recruitment advertising a combination of print, radio and web in Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Like Jobing’s Aaron Matos, Dayton understands that Recruiting is local and that recruitment advertising is built on a base of local transactions. In the wake of the newspaper industry’s complete failure to keep the local employment markets informed, the two entrepreneurs are building major league operations. Local presence, local messaging and local opportunity are at the heart of the value proposition.
That’s part of the reason that LinkUp is such a head turner. Dayton’s latest enterprise is an internet-wide job aggregator that competes in the market with SimplyHired and Indeed. The scale is beyond local but the same attention to detailed market development is at LinkUp‘s heart.
LinkUp‘s strategy is to differentiate based on quality. In other words, they are trying to solve the problem that the other aggregators have: bogus jobs, fake opportunities and redundant postings. The message is that ‘we won’t waste your time’.
They solve the problem by limiting their job scraping activities to bona fide companies. They don’t scrape other job boards or Craigslist. That way, the jobs are as clean as the company websites from which they are aggregated.
It’s brilliant. The more established players are stuck in a web of business development, revenue and partnership that drives the data quality problems in their offerings. By making this market position, LinkUp pins them into their positions.
We think that the message will resonate with job hunters.
