The merit might not be in what some people may call the immediate gimmick, but the opening of an approach to fine cutting and slicing which will significantly add to relevance, which is good news, as every visitor to a large job board can attest. Plus, I like SH’s other gimmicks
How long will it be before we can see jobs by proximity to a child-care center (a not-so-new hack to google maps, anyone?), or benefits/rem benchmarking, or Health and Safety record, Not long, I venture.
January 29, 2006 at 3:16 pm
· Filed under Companies
Pandora Squared’s Kevin Leversee has been in the US for a while now. He makes it very evident to me that the entrepreneur is a different (as in good) sort. He’s coming back with at least one interesting deal off the back of their social network platform..… and now for execution.
CountingJobs, a new job board for the accounting and finance vertical out of Melbourne, already with a few agencies on board… usually I would not have paid attention to a board play at this stage of affairs (or maybe they’re just in time). The focus on a vertical might just enable them to have a (niche but relevant?) presence.
NowHiring, via Michael.. Reading their blog made me realise again how long and how much it takes to come up with a seemingly robust site. Their offering suite might be of fairly immediate interest to sme’s and niche recruiters, of which there are hundreds in this amazing land of ours. Hope I have the chance to speak to them too. First right step may be not to base their revenue on job postings, which would put them in the applicant tracking space as opposed to going head to head with the big three.
Seems to be a local convergence play wanting to target 12 year olds – easy to spot if you look at the previous workplaces of the people behind it.
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January 12, 2006 at 3:03 pm
· Filed under General, Talent
Ok – better get back on the horse, otherwise I will get rusty. Thank you Michael for the encouragement this week.
Mr Specht observed in his latest post that the job boards’ defensive position was understandable, and moved to suggest that the incumbents needed to go further down the recruitment value chain to survive.
On this, I wonder whether the leading job sites see themselves in the recruitment space, as opposed to the classifieds ads space. This distinction would make a job board reluctant to move, say, into the applicant tracking biz in their attempt to provide more value to the employer/advertiser – not only because it is not their business model, but also because it is seen as a financially unattractive detour.
The job board as advertiser-only paradigm might not be such an obscure theory when they are seen as a part of their owners’ stable of online verticals (Seek is now in bed with ninemsn, CareerOne is a News corp. property and MyCareer is a piece of Fairfax, the local media muscle). I venture it would be just as unlikely for any of these portals to go deeper on the automotive (e.g. car maintenance) or real estate (home loans) markets.
On the job search engine side, vertical plays would need the job boards ad stock in this geography, which in turn might lead to a mexican stand off of sorts at least in the immediate term. The other source of ad volumes are the employment agencies, which happen to be the boards’ best clients (I just saw the AP headhunter comment to Michael’s post).
In any case, the engines’ value proposition would need to incorporate the same or better exposure to the same or better quality candidate to get off to a good start in Oz. Local market scale and low use of corporate career sites reinforce the landscape.