Job Boarders

The future of job boards...

Maybe I am missing something, so allow me to pose this question to fellow job board owners and our aggregator friends as well:

Major players in vertical job search engines, Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com and others make it simple for our paying clients (employers & recruiters who purchase job posts on our boards) to feed and promote (PPC) their job openings directly to their respective search engines.

Other products, including Hound & Linkup (& more?) perform the same act for employers only. Sometimes they charge job seekers (Hound), and sometimes employers + PPC (Linkup). In fact, Harrison Barnes, CEO at Hound openly speaks of his hatred of job boards in his pitch to job seekers to sign up for a subscription. http://www.hound.com/gjceohatesjobboards.php

So... what’s the future for job boards driving revenue from ad postings?
Why pay us, as middlemen, when the vertical search engines will gladly scoop up the employer's posting and push it to the top of search results for a few dollars?

We all know the landscape of online job search will continue to change with time. Is extinction of job boards the long range impact, intentional or not, of the aggregator industry and folks from Hound & Linkup?

Views: 122

Tags: Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com, aggregators, vertical job search engines

Comment by Ken Levinson on September 19, 2009 at 4:49pm
To me, an issue of the aggregator sites like Indeed and SimplyHired is the ability to find the jobs of a particular company. Only so many companies can sponsor jobs, and if a job isn't sponsored, a job seeker may need to go through many pages of results to find the jobs of a particular company. That's not usually the case with a typical job board, so the jobs can usually be much easier found. Also, jobs on Indeed and SimplyHired only appear for 30 days. On a job board that's not the case. Lastly, we offer a resume database on our job board, and none of the aggregator sites do. Therefore, both types of sites can be valuable tools.
Comment by Dennis Gorelik on September 19, 2009 at 8:38pm
I see you mentioned Harrison Barnes.
Did you try to Google '"Harrison Barnes" scam'?
Comment by Phil Collins on September 20, 2009 at 1:41pm
Dennis, thanks for your reply an, no I haven't, but a cursory look told me I need to do more.

However, taking Mr. Barnes out of the picture, the questions remain.
Comment by Dennis Gorelik on September 20, 2009 at 2:41pm
Why pay to job board:
1) I believe that basic job postings on job boards should be free.
2) If Recruiter or Employer wants to quickly promote some of her job postings -- then it's time to pay. As far as I know paying directly to job aggregators may have some overhead. Job Aggregators require to setup a job feed and that is not always an easy exercise for the employer / recruiter.
That's where job board's "middleman" service may be more convenient.
Comment by Ken Levinson on September 20, 2009 at 3:16pm
Dennis, your site is free, so respectfully I'd expect your answer. If you offer free, you can't give much for this. Our site does SEO monthly which costs money, and we spend over $50,000 a month to advertise our site, and cross post our client's jobs to over 4,800 other sites. We have a sales staff, extensive hosting and development costs, and a customer support staff. We also spend money for valuable content, and I work way too many hours to not be compensated. Therefore, I really think it depends on your offering as to whether basic job postings should be free. On our site, if they were, we'd be out of business very quickly.
Comment by Dennis Gorelik on September 20, 2009 at 3:26pm
Ken, how do you decide how much to spend for promoting jobs posted on your site?
Obviously the more you spend -- the more pleased your customers would be, but it would cut your profit.
Do you equally promote all postings on your site or some postings are promoted more than others?
Comment by Ken Levinson on September 20, 2009 at 3:35pm
We spend a percentage of revenues. We make our profit by making our clients happy, which helps us add more customers, and keep a high percentage of the customers we have. Our site is subscription oriented, and is like a buffet. Clients pay to use the site, and get to use all aspects we offer on an unlimited basis. We promote all jobs equally.
Comment by Dennis Gorelik on September 20, 2009 at 3:40pm
So, for example you spend 50% of revenue generated by your customer on promoting customer's jobs.
That would mean that if customer pays $100/month and post only on job per month, then $50 would be spent on promoting single job.
But if customer posted 10 jobs per month (and pays the same $100/month subscription fee), then you spend $5/job/month on promoting each of these 10 jobs.
Right?
Comment by Ken Levinson on September 20, 2009 at 3:43pm
No. We spend a percentage of our overall revenues on advertising. For example, if we bill $400,000 in revenues, we might spend 12.5% ($50,000) of that on advertising.
Comment by Dennis Gorelik on September 20, 2009 at 3:51pm
So the more jobs your customer posts -- the more advertisement dollars are spent on that customer's jobs (even though subscription fee stays the same).
Is it your way to encourage your customers to post more jobs?

How did you come up with the number of 12.5%?
How do you know that it's close to optimum?

Comment

You need to be a member of Job Boarders to add comments!

Join Job Boarders

 

 

© 2013   Created by Lance Haun.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service