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.
