Founded in 1998,  SalesTrax caught my attention with its December '07 announcement that job postings would henceforth be free -- unusual for a top-ranked job board.  You can find their job posting policies and pricing here. SalesTrax is based in the Kansas City area and offers "a comprehensive array of Internet services, nationwide career fairs, and direct placement services". 

I wanted to find out from Gary how offering free job postings has worked out and I think you will enjoy reading his story!

Here is why I am so fascinated by the free classifieds concept and in particular free job boards -- they create more value than they capture. I came across this thinking in a post by Aaron Wall today and realized that it perfectly illustrates a serious flaw in the typical job board business model. Generally speaking and within reason, we capture as much value as we can. And that makes us vulnerable, inspires competition and limits our growth. The quote that grabbed me comes from Tim O'Reilly's blog:

The free classifieds and free job boards have fascinated me for years, perhaps because back when I was starting LatPro, the hottest thing around was headhunter.net. It was growing like wildfire and was perfectly free. Times have changed a lot since then and there is a whole new crop of free job boards -- here's the list:

Free classifieds site and craigslist competitor OLX.com raised $13.5m yesterday which brings this Buenos Aires based company's funding to $23.5m. TechCrunch has the story and some interesting comments left by accomplished co-founder Fabrice Grinda:

Classified Intelligence's last report on the RHW deal turned out to be accurate and I think this one is fully credible just on the surface of it. Craigslist is a runaway train. So, what should job board entrepreneurs be thinking about? What should they be doing? This is not an easy question to answer.

You might start by reviewing what others are doing to try to solidify their positions...

Great legal news for job boards!  We regularly see and screen out job postings that violate EEOC laws.  We've been doing this ever since we received an ominous warning from some very official government agency many years ago.  The ads we see are sometimes quite amusing.  One of these days I'll post some of the wacky things we get.

CHICAGO - Craigslist should not be held liable for discriminatory housing ads posted on the popular Web site, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a win for San Francisco-based Craigslist, an online network of classified ads and forums on which more than 30 million notices are posted every month, according to the ruling.

Here's an interesting presentation about content distribution by Fred Wilson called “Does Information Want To Be Free?”

Free Will Pay

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life” - Stewart Brand

As you read it, think about the fact that the price of job postings have risen steadily for years. Maybe job postings are just advertisements and not content?