House of Lies: The Job Posting Ecosystem and Data Ownership

Over the last few weeks, I had the pleasure of chatting with Aneesh Chopra - the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America - on a number of topics related to Skills, Workforce and Innovation.

One of our earlier conversations included the state of job postings online. Aneesh energetically (and nonchalantly) observed that it was all a house of lies - where job matching and or job scraping company after company would forage for as many job postings as possible, ingest them into their own (proprietary) systems, and create business value from them.

This got me thinking. Are companies who are advertising jobs in their firms aware that:

1. Their job posting is their intellectual property (IP)?
2. They own that intellectual property?
3. Their intellectual property is valuable?
4. Some companies are acquiring their intellectual property without their permission and making lucrative businesses from it?

In 2011, Citi estimated the online recruitment market size to be $3 billion globally.

In November of 2013, Staffing Industry predicted the global staffing market to exceed $422 billion by the end of 2013, with 30 percent ($12.6 billion) coming from the U.S.

So, I am guessing that a lot of companies are either unaware of (or unable to do anything about) the widespread theft and misappropriation of job listing data.

Why?

Because for a market of that size, firms that are aware of this would be constantly in litigation to maintain their data ownership rights and keep their IP.

What I find even more fascinating is the slippery slope (of admitting that data ownership matters).

Once firms start taking this seriously, will they then have to admit that they are stewards for the data they receive from their clients/users (and not data owners in that context)?

What do you think?