www.ATT.jobs? Seriously.
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
I’ve finally seen an ad with a .jobs domain. That’s a mistake.
Monday afternoon I made the return car trip from Houston to Austin. It’s about a 3 hour drive without much to see. As I rolled into Austin I saw a billboard for AT&T (NYSE: T). The ad called attention to jobs at AT&T using the URL www.att.jobs.
At this point I’d been driving for a few hours, so I did a double take. Where’s the domain extension? Is that supposed to be www.att.com/jobs? Or are they trying to be gimmicky by showing that they have jobs for techies?
Then it dawned on me: AT&T is using the little used domain extension .jobs. This is one of those top level domains, like .travel, that should have never been created.
Why not just att.com/jobs? That makes sense. People get it. No one (OK, a few people) know that .jobs is a domain. Even for me, someone who lives and breathes domains, it didn’t click the moment I saw the domain.
Now I certainly understand that AT&T couldn’t use the URL for its actual jobs page on the billboard: www.att.com/gen/careers?pid=1. (That’s what att.jobs forwards to, by the way. It’s not a separate site.) But the company should have just gone with www.att.com/jobs. Which, by the way, gives you an error page.
…or even using ATTJobs.com would have made more sense.
I saw this same thing for DirecTV a few weeks ago. My first thought was that most normal people trying to remember the URL would end up going to http://www.directvjobs.com. (Who in the world has ever heard of “.jobs” outside the recruiting industry?)
I imagine the same thing is true for AT&T, so I checked real quick to see where http://www.attjobs.com takes me. Surprisingly, it actually redirects to their site. Not surprisingly, though, it doesn’t actually redirect to their Careers page.
Why are these examples still so common?
it just goes to show you that alot of major corps hire simply webmasters with little domaining experience. Looks like domainers should be alliancing to promote their skills to these people.
@ Primo – I’m curious how this came about. Was it the .jobs registry making a pitch? Maybe .jobs even shares in advertising costs when someone promotes a domain with its TLD?
[...] will be confused. Remember when I saw a billboard advertising att.jobs and did a double take before realizing it was a URL ? You’re going to see a lot more of [...]
maybe people are intelligent enough to read – and will actually visit att.jobs – that is my guess anyways – it may be useless to register and leverage currently – but if more companies start using them as a redirect to their actually career pages – it will catch on – because if I want to find out about jobs at, say Go Daddy, i know its godaddy.jobs – and bingo – career page – its not all that ludicrous of an idea
Brad, that works if the majority of companies start using .jobs. Then you’d feel reasonably certain you could type in company.jobs and find what you’re looking for.
But that will never happen.
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AT&T has changed their main career site to this page.
http://att.jobs/
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