LatinOcean – Digital Marketing Consulting

How good was I? This is a post from ’07

http://bit.ly/c1IdqA

Lazy post, but need to get some momentum going.

Have a good rest of the week.

It’s the beginning of the year and I am already disappointed.

I thought 2010 was going to be the year where significantly less job ads, print or online, were going to include phrases like:

- ‘leading multinational’ to refer to the hiring company
- ‘high calibre individual’ to refer to the candidate they want to attract
- ‘challenging and dynamic environment’ to describe work conditions

What’s the real chance to get who you really want for this role with ‘details’ like those above?

I understand the anonymity has been used to protect clients from ambulance chasers, unsolicited CV’s etc. Those protection costs though are extremely high. It will cost real money to process unsuitable applicants – for example.

You might find the right individual in that hay stack you are generating. But just in case, get your calculator out and do your numbers; your job ads might be making your advertising/sourcing process more expensive than what you imagine.

Recruitment agencies are receiving less assignments from their clients

Recruiters – like all or most of us – need to stay busy or else. They start chasing ads

If they chase ads, they might as well have a candidates that can fill the role

In lieu of/addition to looking at their own databases, recruiters chasing ads opt to create their own sourcing/trawling posts

The incremental cost of posting the trawling job ads is negligible; recruiters may have already paid for them as part of their monthly contracts

Applications per ad are already up given our context

Candidates won’t get much attention, because the recruiter’s interest in them is contingent on the ad-chasing success ratio (which I would say is low)

Hiring companies are getting peeved with cold-calling consultants, which leads them to (if possible) write more and more generic ads so that they are not identified by ad-chasers

What’s in the horizon?

As contracts with job boards get renewed maybe there will be less ads (both good and bad, but proportionally less bad ones)

Reduced confidence on recruiters will lead job seekers to going back to job seeking via people you can trust, which can also include hand-picked recruiters, but also colleagues, friends, family.

Referrals based on trawling ads will not produce results.

Niche sites that have the inclination and capacity to monitor the quality of job ads could also get the thumbs up. Issue here is: what’s quality? An ad for a work-from-home scheme? The fifth version of the same ad? A suspicious looking/fake one? The more judgment you apply the more labor-intensive / costly the exercise.

Hiring organisations have an opportunity to work on their employer brand during this time, A ‘grey’ recruitment practice does not necessarily imply low candidate quality.

Thank you @jobadder for your comments re. niche sites

Hope your week finishes very well

A few days back @gapingvoid twitted a link to a WJS article series describing the experience of recently made-unemployed US-based MBAs. In it, there was a sort of side-piece written by one of the individuals profiled, which touched on online job boards.. He says:

External job boards have certainly helped me with the search process, no doubt. They are great sources of information for discovering which companies are hiring for what. But when it comes to actually securing a position, my efforts in this area have been completely fruitless. In my conscious recollection, any resume that I have sent off into the oblivion of the Internet has never garnered a response of interest. In fact, a very small percentage returned any response whatsoever.

He then moves onto saying the following about vertical search engines (aggregators)

The job search sites that have been most beneficial are SimplyHired and Indeed, which aggregate job content from all around the web. These aggregator sites don’t necessarily provide the answers, they simply strengthen the cornerstone of daily searches by providing breadth and depth that other external boards don’t. I’ve also found that most of these job listings are linked to internal career Web sites so I can apply directly and even see other opportunities of interest. Best of all, these sites don’t require job seekers to have an account, or post their resume.

Apples to oranges, isn’t it

People use job boards and job search engines differently, driving significantly different expectations. A response is expected for a job application sent through a job board. From an aggregator, visitors expect depth/coverage (more job ads sources, better data slicing).

On the job board, people are job seekers, on the aggregator they turn into job researchers.

You will know that job boards are not the ones who are ignoring applications. It’s the consultant or the hiring manager – that is, advertisers – who would decide that there’s no point in getting in touch with unsuitable applicants, at least on a timely basis.

Meantime, you as a job board owner/manager and your brand are taking the heat.

So, how do you make the job board experience better for a job seeker?

- Do you follow up the advertiser and then ‘get in the middle’ and let applicants know of your efforts to ensure they get some sort of response?

- Do you let job seekers know that there is nothing you can do?

I reckon that job board owners/managers will be more inclined to do nothing if they think they are in the advertising industry. Conversely, if they see their organisation inscribed in the recruitment industry, they might be prone to make something to contribute to the recruitment experience.

Either way, it will come back to them.

Have a great week

Recently, Geoff Jennings reported a price increase in the C1 product which, correction notwithstanding, still took home the message that noone likes a price hike. Fair enough.

Even though nominal prices per ad were to go up for advertisers can I suggest the acquisition cost of acquiring candidates/job applicants may be going down?

This would be the obvious result of having more applications per ad (in turn due to more people looking for work altogether and, to a lesser extent, reduced ad re-posting). This argument assumes similar ‘quality’ of applicants, which is a can of worms I will open for the next inauguration, if ok with you.

Last time I checked, at 185 USD, a LinkedIn ad looked pretty unaffordable, in the words of a few recruiters I spoke to. But, what if that ad delivers more ‘quality’ candidates, or even the candidate that ends up being placed, earning the fees to the consultant?

I made this point in a previous post, Advertisers pay for an ad, but expect more than posting; they expect distribution and targeting. So if C1 is nominally more expensive than Seek for some of its ad packages. they might want to get ready to justify it in terms of application volumes (post note: turns out they’re not more expensive than Seek which puts the universe in balance again).

This tight period may prompt advertisers to pick up a pencil and review the source of their candidates; nominal per-ad prices might be misleading.

At the beginning, it was good mainly for Posting. You could plaster and ad, a marketing brochure, etc. All there was left to do was to stick in a link on an email, print ad, etc. this is the ‘canvas’ era.

Then the web enabled Aggregating. For job ads, this meant shoving classifieds in one central point, that would help with exposure/effectiveness; this is the ‘eyeballs’ era.

Subsequently, the web got good at Distributing. (the ‘social’ era – not just 2.0 social web stuff; I mean search, syndication, ad networks, etc. I guess it also includes 2pointoh)

Publishers (say job boards) that leveraged of what the web had to offer during these eras, are finding market players that ultimately challenge them at the highest/current point of the ‘value of the web’ continuum. Example: job search engines competing on the basis of its distribution prowess (if/when available), without offering Posting.

It would be great if you accept that this ‘era’ model can help build a simple strategy framework for organisations that want to succeed in the online recruitment advertising space. If that’s the case, it might be worthwhile sketching a few ideas on the following fronts:

- What’s the next / upcoming web era after distribution? That is, from where is the incremental value to be offered to your market going to come from? If you answer ‘mobile’ or ‘networks’ i think you’re kidding yourself.

- Do you need to redefine who your customer is? Or do you just need to change/increase the markets you serve?

- Do you need to redefine which business you’re in? Do you sell ad distribution or are you in the job seeker/career management services bizo?

I reckon those have a dozen sub-questions. Any takers?

Stay well

Belated happy new ’09. Nice to be back

A bit of a rant and/or speculations re. the news on job ads

a) The 50% + decline in newspaper ads includes the economic slow down factor and the migration to online factor which, if you have seen the Seek investor presentations, is BIG

b) The almost 30% decline in online ads includes the slow down factor, the ‘less-reposting’ factor and to a still small extent, to a ‘migration off classifieds’ factor.

c) If you take a) and b), then the corollary is that the decline in the actual job openings is less dramatic that the ad statistics.

d) There will be more applicants per job ad, but possibly less applications overall (due to lesser volumes of ads). But if you accepted a) and b) then it will not be 50 or even 30% harder to get a job, ceteris paribus

John Sumser wrote about how the media loves the bad news. I encourage everyone not to make our own gloom.

- What is the current theoretical value of 50% of career one? Any guesses?
- Sounds like this is take 2 of ‘feed the monster’ strategy (with resumes, that is) which might just put another local resume database product out there
- I guess the product and tech guys at C1 if any, are now gone / redeployed to other properties? Therefore, only local sales teams? Any local systems support people? Hope they ensure the service does not deteriorate
- Will there be a s**t fight for the revenue of the proposed offline/online product bundle
- Careermonster – or Monsterone – might go back in rankings before it gets back to number 2 or better
- The new site might be cheaper to run, therefore more profitable operation