Www.hound.com is a job search website that operates on a different business model from other job search websites.
Sites such as Monster and Careerbuilder charge employers and recruiters to post their position openings, while people can search the postings for free. Hound.com however, does not take money from employers. Instead, it charges job seekers money to search their database of job openings culled from thousands of employer sites around the world. While you can search for employment opportunities at the site without paying, you are only told of the job description but not the company unless you have a paid subscription. There is a 72 hour “risk-free” trial period before your credit card is charged for the first month’s subscription.
Initially, this sounds like a plausible business model. Most companies do indeed post their job openings on their own company site in addition to major employment sites like Monster.com, since its free for these companies to post on their own sites, and these pages get indexed by search engines such as Google and Yahoo and show up in Google searches for job openings.
That said, there are several major practical problems with www.hound.com.
Firstly, many of the working opportunities can be found with a simple Google search without using Hound, especially if you know the job description, or if you’re looking for a relatively narrow range of jobs and know which companies are likely to offer those jobs.
Secondly, there are numerous complaints on the web saying that their 72 hour free trial can only be canceled by telephone during California working hours, and so results in many unhappy customers being charged for services they had no intention of using.
Thirdly, this business model is very labor intensive because it requires interactions with numerous job seekers (rather than with less numerous employers), and the company may have under-budgeted for its customer service representatives, resulting in less than ideal customer service. And finally, the company seems to have been very diligent in adding new job postings from employer sites, but somewhat less diligent in removing old postings, resulting in customers complaining about receiving postings that have already been filled.
Due to these drawbacks, I would suggest using a general search engine such as Google and Bing to search employer sites yourself first before resorting to this site.