Www.ATT.jobs? Seriously.

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 regarding 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 ought to 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 firm ought to have just gone with www.att.com/jobs. Which, by the way, gives you an error page.