I am still scratching my head about thebigchair. Maybe it’s that Fairfax got me used to the sleeker mycareer and the newest channel looks blunter that it really is. Maybe it is early stages and there are really, really big changes for the site already under way. Maybe for the next release I can actually search for jobs, as opposed to just be able to browse, and browse.
If I had it my way, I would have not wrecked the fin review online a few months ago and would have sprinkled big chair content all over and around it. Imagine a smooth bubble or dialog box or something prompting people for an exec role with a company when there is a news piece about that company and you hover on the article. You did not even have to spend money to build another brand and drive traffic to another career site. And if you are thinking “what happens if the news is not good for the hiring company?” well it can’t be that bad to provide a potential applicant with relevant information, can it?
Other than that, one of the benefits for the site as explained in recruiterdaily, is that visitors can make expressions of interest, without submitting a CV; I guess the research Fairfax made shows this function is a plus because seniors don’t like to send their CV online.
Three points on this:
- my theory is that top-end candidates do not want to send their CV’s to people they don’t know or haven’t heard of. Resumes from senior professionals fly all over the internet via email, once relationships are built. So this is not a channel issue, this is a trust issue; information resolves the issue: information about the employer, the agency, the consultant, the job itself
- a serious recruitment process does not kick off without a resume, period. That may be something you and I don’t like, but that’s how it works at the moment. It will take significant changes for recruiters to do away with the document in its current form and substance
- the majority of the current advertisers to thebigchair, within which you can find the larger agencies, still prefer to by-pass the expression of interest jig and request for applicants to use the advertiser’s own apply online engine. So, not much damage done.
You’ve hit the key point dead on. Unless I’ve missed a trick, The BigChair does not appear to be associated with the Financial Review at all. The site says its bought to you by the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. But not the AFR.
The key question for me is how are they going to generate candidates for this site if its not being promoted in the AFR, and (so far) hasn’t made an appearance in the SYdney Morning Herald (nor the Age as far as I am aware)?
There are far better websites for News, Cars, Gadgets and Real Estate, and I cannot imagine executives or anyone choosing The Big Chair as their core destination for this type of content.
As for the job content on the site, there are more executive jobs on MyCareer, Seek, Seek Executive, CareerOne, and the Hudson, Michael Page, Hays, Derwent, Robert Walters and Chandler McLeod websites, which puts the Big Chair at somewhere around number 10 or less in job volumes for executives, and somewhere below all of these websites for traffic. Neither of these are enticing consumer or advertiser propositions.
Despite the promotion of the newspapers on the new website, I did not see a single mention of the Big Chair in the Sydney Morning Herald this weekend, which seemed like a pretty major oversight - although perhaps with advertiser dollars being spent on the official launch party this week, we’ll see the Big Chair make a big splash in the papers this coming weekend.
Still, the absence of the AFR in the Big Chair strategy to me says it all - if whoever it is who makes strategic decisions about Fairfax’s employment classifieds future cannot get the AFR to participate in the Big Chair, then why should we recruiters spend our dollars there?
Also, why would we recruiters spend our money and provide our content to bring a more expensive website into the market that will only cost us an arm and a leg in future? Recruiters have successfully prevented Seek from doing this with Seek Executive by posting all their ads on the cheaper Seek site. MyCareer appears to be heading down the same ill-trodden path as Seek in this regard - if recruiters can prevent Seek from creating a more expensive destination for executive job adverts, they can certainly do the same for the Big Chair.
I’m not sure if recruiters have been too successful in preventing seek running a executive channel; I don’t have the info to say if they do or don’t produce results for advertisers, but from a volumes perspective seek exec appears robust to me (maybe too robust as there are more than exec jobs in there).
back to the topic. i wonder if bigchair cannot have an association with AFR because it (the fin review i mean) could be separately sold to the best suitor as deregulation in the space unfolds.. just speculating…
At the end of the day The Big Chair is just another job board, and is unlikely to reach a different market than Seek. Let’s face it, recruiters are not going to stop advertising on Seek, so Fairfax are hoping they can persuade recruiters to increase their ad spend.
I couldn’t find any pricing on The Big Chair which I thought was a little suspicious. But I can’t imagine them planning to charge more that about $250 for a casual ad. When you compare this to the $5000 - $10,000 per ad they get from display ads in The Age, SHM and AFR, one has to wonder what the strategy is. I suppose there could be some fear that some day soon people will stop reading newspapers but they were saying that 15 years ago.
The reality is, recruiters need different products that will reach a different audience, and print media is still does that. The Big Chair does not.