easy for the niche? really?

Advertising, Job Boards, Sourcing, Talent Add comments
Apr 122007

As reported today in shortlist and over a month ago here, careersites joins a raft of specialised/vertical job boards in Australia, all hoping to get some of the online advertising action. You can now see the careersites profession portals they will want to play on – at least initially – and a link to something called Talentbank which is throwing one of those unhandled server errors as at tonight @ 10:30 pm

When I started marketing LatinOcean’s services, I was of the opinion that niche sites attending specific professions, demographics or even regions had a good chance to produce quality candidates for advertisers. Fact is, the agencies I have spoken to and worked with over the past few months tell me that the sites they have trialled or subscribed to have failed dismally to produce the expected flow of applications. I get this may be a statistically unsound sample to infer much about niche sites, but it did surprise me that noone had anything positive to say about them.

So what’s the story? Are vertical boards generally undernourished from a marketing perspective? Is the size of the market too small for specialist boards to operate at a scale that makes a difference to advertisers? Is the classifieds model itself tired and on the out? Do the people that run these sites know more about classifieds that the vertical they are trying to serve?

If you know of happier experiences with niche sites – and you are not the owner of one – let us know. All the best to the new players too

Posted by jorge at 4:44 am
  • http://www.NowHiring.com.au Brett

    All good things come with time Jorge. No-one has anything good to say about recruiters either, but we all use them and most of them are quite profitable :)

    I won’t bore you with success stories but I will say that not all niche sites are created equal, and not all niche markets lend themselves well to successful niche sites. It is definitely not ‘he with the most sites’ that wins in niche. It is not a numbers game – it is a quality game.

    Keep this post handy and make a note in your calendar to touch base on this subject in 12 months from now. It will be a very interesting exercise.

  • http://www.xpand.biz Justin Babet

    Xpand is a mid size IT & Digital Media recruitment agency based in Sydney and Melbourne. We use some of the major job boards in Australia (Seek and CareerOne) but also a range of niche job boards which we find highly effective – namely:
    http://www.gurus.com.au (IT specific site in Australia)
    http://www.softwaredevelopers.com.au
    http://www.oraclecareers.com (global site)
    http://www.dynamicscareers.com (global site)
    http://www.sapcareers.com (global site)

    The two sides of the coin are quality and quantity. The major job boards provide the quantity which can be useful, but it can also waste time. The niche job boards we use provide the quality and I know when I get a response from the niche sites that it will be a very close match to what I’m looking for.

    So from my personal experience the niche sites are an invaluable tool.

    I don’t know if all niche sites are created equally however. The smaller job boards have smaller marketing budgets and smaller potential audiences so it can be tough to get traction. In my experience though it’s those job boards that know their niche and are an active part of that community that do well.

  • jorge

    Brett, I guess we use recruiters and some boards because they do the job better than others (better not meaning great every time either), or we are not educated yet on alternate ways to tap onto quality people. The views I got about niche sites did not indicate dislike but disappointment. Let’s give them time.

    Justin, great to hear the comments about the sites you use. I wonder though if your own niche is prone for a better utilisation of a specialist board, for the obvious reasons. Brett reminded me of jobnet, which was the last site I heard people raving about, before it got blown away by jobserve

    Which means that generalisations about niche sites performance might be a moot point i.e. success needed to be seen in light of the vertical attended to, as well as the board’s know-how of the sector they are trying to serve, and the candidates they aim to attract.

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