Aug 112008
Apr 302008
Nov 112007
No reason why they or you shouldn’t have a go
Oct 292007
From PC World, quite an uncommitted article but this in my view is just the tip of the iceberg. I will see if I can dig down a piece from the 90′s that said that job boards were kinda looking good at the time, though most of the candidates were still coming from print ads.
Jun 072007
The notes to the latest Seek Employment Index report that on a year-to-year basis job applications are 5.5% higher compared to a corresponding 35.8% increase in news job ads posted to their site. I assume that the numbers for the other two biggest job boards show similar trends (set me straight if I am wrong please)
If I were to stick to the Seek numbers, the stats are saying that a typical/average advertiser is getting @ 22% less applications per ad; which implies less candidate processing work, less job-application-related exchanges, etc; so this is in itself not a bad thing from a processing cost and churn side of the equation.
The problem arises when with the available candidate pool (constantly fed by your applications flow) you cannot fill the role. What this means in turn is that the candidates that make up the 22% that are NOT applying to the roles you advertise happen to be the ones you needs to make a placement or fill a vacancy. So you could be receiving 22% less applications but in fact you may be losing up to 100% of your quality applications (placeable candidates).
What do you do if you are an advertiser?
What advertising advice do you have to give if you are a job board?
If you find flaws in my reasoning, pls give me a shout… and kudos to Seek for their transparency with the trends.
In chronological order
Exhibit A: Facebook offering free classifieds
Exhibit B: Fred Wilson‘s ‘does information want to be free’ preso (pdf)
Exhibit C: Google Base API available for classifieds galore and ancillary mashups since late last year (see example applications)
Exhibit D: Sumser’s free classifieds on his 2005 review
Wanna contribute with a milestone of your own?
Apr 182007
alexa rankings for .com.au domains
realestate = 964
myhome = 98,055
houses = 539,050
carpoint = 456
drive = 7,899
cars = 556,862
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
Romeo and Juliet, Act II
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.
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
