Seek And You Shall Find
July 28, 2008 by Geoff Jennings
Seek are the clear market leaders in Australia on all measures.
However this status also makes them a target for those misleading or undesirable ads that seem to get through the filters.
Take this example. A general search on Seek Executive Brisbane shows:
1. This is meant to be for $100k + jobs.
2. This isn’t the first time this has been flagged with Seek.
3. A search on the other job boards revealed no presence of these types of ads.
Surely as the market leaders, Seek can take measures to avoid this, especially in the executive section, where ads are fewer and advertisers could easily be monitored manually.
Care factor O.
They are still there Seek and have posted more??
Strange no response. I did report some the other day as well.
Hey guys – chill out – these ads generate revenue for shareholders! Who cares that they might mislead jobseekers?
Hey davidand
The idea that any job board in Australia is deliberately taking criminals’ money on behalf of shareholders is frankly bordering on defamation.
As many of Geoff’s job board employee readers already know, we work closely and collectively on this issue as an industry – all job boards including SEEK take consumer protection very seriously indeed.
From time to time fraudulent advertisers may evade initial detection – they’re persistent – but we have a number of measures in place to ensure jobseekers are not affected.
This poorly disguised attempt at crime on SEEK Executive received no attention from jobseekers whatsoever.
My my – we are sensitive aren’t we?? Carey I’ve just responded to your other blog re Smuz, only to have it confirmed here that you are indeed a Seek’er (OK, I’m new here and I’m slow. Forgive me).
Dunno where the criminals come into it? I’ve heard there are some really bad people out there, so I just read the ads again and still didn’t feel the need to go out and buy a gun. Hell, I didn’t even get scared!
But I am comforted to know that Seek are out there protecting me, and I’m not even a shareholder! Pity you didn’t warn me about Firepower.
Question for Carey: Why does Seek, in blocking access to aggregators, deny their advertisers access to thousands of potentially highly-qualified jobseekers? And let’s not go down the “copyright” path – Seek doesn’t own the copyright to the ads – that is owned by the authors, who are led to believe that by posting their ads on Seek, they will be seen by as many potential candidates as possible.
Hey David
Only just seen this question on what was quite an old thread so apologies for not responding.
I’m quite surprised at your suggestion that SEEK is “denying” our advertisers access to lots of candidates. I might be stating the obvious here but SEEK clearly has millions more jobseekers on our site every month than anyone else – 3.2 million last month – and the idea that we’re restricting this in any way is simply nonsensical – it can’t possibly be in our interest to do so.
Another interpretation of your question is that there are large volumes of jobseekers using aggregators in Australia. This is not supported by any publicly available evidence. If you look at any measurement service from Neilsen to Hitwise to Google to Alexa, you’ll see SEEK with a two-thirds market share of eyeball-minutes (proxy for attention), MyCareer & CareerOne competing for circa 15% each, the government and defence websites with the remaining share, followed by SEEK Executive, several recruitment agency websites, several corporate career websites, JJJ / X, LinkMe, Jobserve, TheBigChair and a long tail after that. I haven’t seen anything that suggests aggregators are a. anywhere in the top 20 online destinations for job content in Australia b. moving up the list in any meaningful trend.
Even assuming an aggregator makes it into the Top 20 sometime soon, I’d seriously question whether the traffic they’re receiving is traffic that’s not using SEEK or has never heard of SEEK.
So its not a question of copyright at all – we don’t control the law – its a question of really not having any sensible reason to simply hand over our ad volumes for not a lot of value to our advertisers.
Interesting response Carey, but aggregators are sending hundreds of thousands of qualified jobseeker referrals every month to jobsboards that allow their content to be crawled. So, to try to get you to frame your answer in terms of servicing your clients, rather than in terms of Seek’s sensational market position, what if your big recruiter/advertiser clients demanded that their ads were seen by as many people as possible. Would Seek then allow their ads to have wider distribution through aggregation?
And are eyeball minutes only about “attention”, or could it be that aggregator sites are so efficient at sending jobseekers to other sites quickly and effectively, that they don’t rank highly on this metric? After all, an aggregation site is surely working at its best when it sends jobseekers to other sites as quickly as possible?
Hey David
I’m taking it you work for or with an aggregator?
For the sake of clarifying, I’ll accept your proposition that “aggregators are sending hundreds of thousands of qualified jobseeker referrals every month to job boards”
The point is that in Australia SEEK already has those people, plus millions more.
In the U.S. and the U.K. , aggregators are providing some value in that they address a real problem for jobseekers and advertisers: a fragmented market for job or candidate information. That problem simply doesn’t exist in Australia largely because SEEK and its two main competitors cover more than 100% of both markets..
I’d also debate your last point – I think the value proposition of an aggregator is not that its fast (every job board is fast). Its value proposition is that it actually delivers a good candidate someone doesn’t already have, or delivers a jobseeker a good job that someone doesn’t already have or when it solves the fragmented market problem for jobseekers. None of these are problems that SEEK is not already addressing with our customers.
The other glaring fact here is that if aggregators were so successful here, you’d expect to see a mass exodus of all advertisers from their paid job board contracts with SEEK and other job boards and go for the free advertising of aggregators. That does not seem to be occuring.
OK, this one could run and run.
To further clarify, I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that “Seek already has those people…” (that aggregators have). Maybe… maybe not… granted you have lots of traffic but to imply that every visitor to an aggregator also visits Seek is a trifle arrogant don’t you think?
But that pales in comparison to your next statement, “Seek and its two main competitors cover more than 100% of both markets.”. Wow! Not only do you claim every visitor for Seek, but you also claim visitors that don’t exist!
That aside, your closing statement goes to the heart of the issue. You simply don’t understand how aggregators work (and you work in the industry?!!). Advertisers CANNOT place ads on aggregator sites, at any cost, even for free! Aggregators are not jobsboards, they simply aggregate and display content from other sites, then, and this is the bit that you need to read very slowly, THEY SEND THOSE SITES PRE-QUALIFIED JOBSEEKER REFERRALS!
To prove my point, try to place an ad on http://www.jseeker.com.au/ or http://www.westjobs.com.au/ – and they’re both aggregators.
Carey, aggregators aren’t your enemy – they’re not in competition with Seek for advertiser revenues. They could be your FRIEND, helping you to distribute your clients’ ads to a wider audience.
But as long as you don’t understand how they work, I guess that won’t happen.