INDIANAPOLIS – Sometime this week, about 25,000 new recruitment sites will roll out – all with the Dot-jobs top-level domain. Or maybe it’s just one site, with 25,000 separate URLs.

Either way, the launch it could fundamentally change recruitment online, if it isn’t five (or 10) years too late and hasn’t been eclipsed by social media, recruiting from professional networking sites like LinkedIn, and deep-dive candidate sourcing that never touches a recruitment site.

How will it play out?

We’re impressed with a lot of the features of Dot-jobs, but it’s going to take a while to grow through search-engine optimization, search-engine marketing and promotion. It will also need to change Web users’ intuition and search habits. Those last two are particularly tough, so the game for Dot-jobs may be over before it starts.

And it will compete directly with today’s recruitment sites – the CareerBuilders, Seeks and IEEE sites that have won tremendous support and visibility (and profits) among their constituents during the past decade or more. While the Dot-jobs domain has essentially been on “idle” for five years, most other recruitment sites have been growing and tweaking and adjusting to the fast-changing market conditions and job-seeker / employer expectations.

Briefly, some background. ICANN, the oversight organization for Internet domains, in 2004 approved the addition of a “dot-jobs” top-level domain, meaning that sites with job listings could become a direct entry point for jobs. Managed by Employ Media of Cleveland, Ohio, dot-jobs was launched with great fanfare in 2005.

At the time, Employ Media and the Society for Human Resource Management said dot-jobs sites would only be available to major corporate employers listing specific jobs, and would permit only those listings and corporate recruitment information. A few thousand companies signed up, but Dot-jobs was essentially moribund.

Now the game is changing.

Dot-jobs is becoming an extremely low-cost aggregator of job listings. Most postings are free; the remainder are just $25 each. The site or sites, depending on your perspective, has thousands or maybe even millions of jobs. It claims to offer more than Monster.com in the U.S. (More about that in a minute.)

We met this week with Bill Warren, the executive director of DirectEmployers and a one-time president of Monster.com who claims to have essentially started the online recruiting business from scratch with OCC, Online Career Center, a predecessor to Monster.com. A handful of recruitment analysts gathered at DirectEmployers’ offices in Indianapolis so Warren and his executive team could lay out their vision for Dot-jobs.

DirectEmployers, a non-profit association of about 500 employers who pay $15,000 each to become members, runs a recruitment site, JobCentral.com. And now it runs US.jobs, the overall dot-jobs site. It’s using the back-end developed by JobCentral, its affiliated company, to run the thousands of domains that it will launch. They all operate on the same platform, with different names. The look-and-feel of each site is the same. With free postings available to all employers, and paid postings just $25, it even undercuts Craigslist. Warren insists it’s generating more than enough money to run the site. He says his  companies don’t receive any of the revenue from the postings and the featured listings — and as non-profits, they aren’t allowed to do so, he says. His only goal, he says, is to increase the number of companies that join DirectEmployers. (Only members receive the extremely impressive set of analytics and back-end tools that are available with dot-jobs and JobCentral.com.) The dot-jobs sites won’t carry advertising, according to Warren, although each landing page has three positions for featured employers, sold on a first-come, first-served basis, with rates ranging from just $1,500 to $5,000 per year. Right now, feature positions are only offered to DirectEmployers members, and are handled through Employ Media.

Because of the free or low prices, major recruitment sites and niche sites might have cause for alarm about Dot-jobs and its slice-and-dice sites. It’s now reaching about 6 million unique users a month, Warren says, and it has more unduplicated job listings than Monster.com. “We have 100,000 to 150,00 more jobs,” he said. (We asked Monster for a comment, but haven’t heard back yet. We’ll update this post as soon as they reply. We’ll also have a lot more about Dot-jobs in the weeks ahead.)

Warren says the company could be seen as a direct competitor to sites like Monster and CareerBuilder, and also niche sites, but doesn’t want them to perceive it that way.

“We want to work as closely as possible with commercial job boards,” Warren said at a four-hour explanatory meeting with a handful of recruitment industry analysts this week.

“Our mission is not to dominate or take over or whatever, I think, as some people feel. … On the other hand, I think some of the things [that other recruitment sites are concerned about] could become a reality.”

Pressed repeatedly on “how would you work with commercial recruitment sites?,” Warren said he had no answers but was willing to consider all possibilities.

Why should existing recruitment sites be concerned?

Dot-jobs could be an inherently intuitive top-level domain for finding jobs – or it could have been, if it was a TLD 10 years ago. Think Hyatt.jobs, Portland.jobs, or engineering.jobs. All three could easily become a shorthand for searches, rather than going to, say, Hyatt.com and finding the jobs section, or trying to find a local site in Portland, or searching on Monster.com for jobs in Portland.

Postings are now captured three ways:

— Members of DirectEmployers Association feed their jobs directly into the system, or they are captured by an interface tool

— More than 40 state workforce agencies feed all of their job listings into the site. (That means any employer with an opening who submits it to the state workforce agency — which most do — will have its listings automatically uploaded to JobCentral.com and appropriate dot-jobs sites.)

— Individual employer postings, at $25 each.

It’s that last one, especially, that poses concern for more traditional recruitment sites – which Warren referred to repeatedly as “job boards.” (We think a “job board” is just a small slice of a recruitment site, which these days needs to include matching tools, resume database, applicant tracking, social media support and more.) If the site develops enough traffic and becomes a universal site for job-seekers, it could undermine more expensive sites — which right now are charging typically $300 to $400 for each posting. And some niche sites charge even more.

Dot-jobs incorporates some very impressive social networking tools, allowing users to link almost seamlessly to LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and others, and tie job listings to their pages or transmit them to friends and colleagues.

One thing it does not offer is a resume database; Warren explained that in DirectEmployers’ view, resumes should belong to the job-seekers and the employers, and that an extensive database of prospects is a target for identity thieves and scam artists, posing concerns that DirectEmployers doesn’t want to have to deal with.

IBM human resources exec Ray Schreyer, whose title is an unbelievable mouthful (“program manager, interactive channels, human resources, talent delivery and support”), said at the meeting that the major recruitment sites have priced themselves out of the market. He discussed one large company that was told it would have to pay $1.9 million to post all of its listings and get full resume access from a major site for one year. By contrast, he said, all of the employers in DirectEmployers post all of their openings for $15,000, and receive great analytic tools to determine where their referrals are coming from, how their social network participation is working, and so forth.

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I’ll be posting more notes-and-quotes from the meeting, and we’ll also have extensive reaction during the next few days. While we may be making more out of Dot-jobs than it deserves, it does have the potential to cause a fundamental shift in the online recruitment environment — so it bears close watching.

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Jim Townsend, our editorial director and recruitment specialist, and I are both available for consultations with clients on “what does this mean to us? Should we really care?” and the like. If you’re interested, e-mail us at pzollman@aimgroup.com or JimT@aimgroup.com and we’ll set up a time. Or call the AIM Group office, 407-788-2780, and let us know what time would work for you.

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One of our (many) earlier articles about Dot-jobs is here; more great coverage from John Zappe, our former analyst who’s now with ERE.net, is here.

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