As a small number of companies, including the big job search engines, prepare to spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads this Sunday, I’m pondering a few questions about the search engines’ ad campaigns:

1. Are most jobseekers as miserable as CareerBuilder and Monster portray them to be — or is there something Freudian going on here? Maybe the truly miserable ones are the advertising agency creatives who can’t come up with a better reason to use the typical job board than, “You’re so desperate and unhappy — try us!” Of course, the idea that you could find relief from misery by searching for jobs online is a little ironic to us. RiseSmart customers come to us specifically because searching for jobs online makes them miserable.

2. What is it with TheLadders.com and CareerBuilder and the use of animals (and even monsters — yes, I get the joke) in place of actual people in their commercials? To paraphrase John Merrick, you are not an animal! You are a person, and chances are, your professional yearnings and desires are far more personal, and more important to you, than these ads — playing for laughs — would suggest. That’s why RiseSmart’s service is human-powered — with a real HR professional engaged in every job search on our customers’ behalf.

3. Is it really effective for TheLadders.com to work your ego so transparently? “We only work with the big talent,” the ad says. From what I can gather, as long as you plunk your money down, you’re in. Now, what they don’t bother to tell you in this ad is that they only have a small fraction of available $100K jobs on their site — because they charge employers to post listings. That’s the kind of exclusivity that can cost you a job — not find you one.

So as I sit back and watch Super Bowl XLIII on Sunday, I’ll take satisfaction in knowing that while the big search engines are offering jobseekers intangible benefits like a relief from misery or a stroke of the ego, we continue to focus on delivering what our customers want most: a job.

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