Paul Forster, founder and CEO of Indeed and Phil Carpenter, SimplyHired’s Vice President of Marketing, spoke at DirectEmployers’ annual meeting last month in Las Vegas. Their presentations were very well received and were highly rated by recruiting professionals from leading U.S. employers.

The reaction I witnessed from some of the country’s leading recruiting professionals was exactly opposite to some of the opinions I have recently heard expressed on blogs. Some critics seem to be equating vertical search engines to the original Flipdog site (not the Flipdog site that has been recently resurrected by Monster).

The big difference — and it is a very BIG difference — is the old Flipdog crawled around collecting job information, brought it back to its own site, and displayed it in frames as if it was its own content.

If the descriptions I have recently heard applied to vertical search engines were applied to the old Flipdog I could understand the point. However, these descriptions in no way apply to today’s vertical search engines because the technology, process, intent and end results are in no way similar.

Today’s vertical search engines act in many ways for jobs like the Google search engine works for the Internet in general. They identify the link and take the job seeker to the job on the company or job board site. Bottom line — more traffic to the corporate web site or job board. Bottom line for job seekers — much faster job search across many corporate employment web sites and job boards. It is safe to say the Las Vegas audience was thoroughly impressed and expressed no concerns or apprehension about their jobs being “stolen” from their web site.

Gautam Godhwani, SimplyHired’s CEO, clearly articulated his take on the industry better than I ever could in an extremely well done (podcast) interview with Joel Cheesman at the recent Kennedy Conference in New York. Taking 12 minutes to listen to the interview will be time well spent.

The folks over at Google and individuals like Gautam Godhwani and Paul Forster are bright, articulate, passionate, and high-principled — and they are building better mouse traps. That’s what this great country is all about.