2009 Predictions
January 6, 2009 by Geoff Jennings
The Christmas trees have now (hopefully) all been packed away, everyone’s recovered from their post NYE HOs, and we’re all gearing up for a fascinating 2009.
Seek, CareerOne and MyCareer have all just popped around and drawn the tarots from the deck (not REALLY. You guys have got to learn not to take everything I write literally:)) and here are the results of the session. Here are, in other words, the Geoff Jennings predictions for the online recruitment market in 2009:
Seek will target the SME market
Seek has seen consistent revenue growth of over 30% for the past four years. This is largely attributed to growing job ad volumes, price increases and the Seek Learning revenue contribution. 2009 will be a very different story for the market leader and it will take a mighty effort to achieve 0% growth. They might attempt this feat by:
- Ditching their focus on recruiters and targeting the SME’s (Small Medium Sized) businesses, especially those who currently advertise in print. This will enable them to tap into a new advertiser that will be much easier to grow the yield with because it is accustomed to paying hefty print prices.
- Push new products. Stand Out ads, Premium ads…obviously, this will also contribute to yield growth and it is a path that Seek has already begun to promenade.
- Grow the Learning business: this will supplement the losses of the Core business.
- Concentrate on ensuring that the international investments work contribute to the bottom line.
CareerOne will tread water.
No significant inroads were made by CareerOne in 2008. I’m going to acknowledge that they moved ahead of MyCareer in traffic numbers, and this was a good effort…but that has more to do with my imbibing post-festive spirit and less to do with any sort of massive leap by the former.
In 2007 they sold against the promise of a new website for almost a year, leaving many advertisers scratching their heads. They’re likely to do the same in 2009, as a result of the new joint venture with Monster. We might see some action on the new look partnership offering by the end of 2009, but by then it will be too little too late for their bottom line. Promises, promises…
MyCareer will change business models.
MyCareer will move from being a generalist job board (with the only variation on this being their failed attempt with Job Fox in the Headhunter plan). They will continue their downsizing (hopefully with a little more aplomb than their last Melbourne attempt) and they will cash in on their quality audience by launching a range of fully-integrated EGN executive ads. across all their online news sites. They could also acquire PageUp People, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) provider that has an enviable relationship with the corporate market that MyCareer could benefit from. This would also mean getting in before Seek does.
These pimps of the job space are here and have set-up shop on a street corner near you. Will they make any real impact on the job market? Probably not. They fall short in a few areas. Firstly, they don’t really have an adequate revenue model and we don’t have enough users in Australia to warrant further investment. Secondly, Seek has ensured the demise of aggregators by not allowing its job inventory to be scrapped. Lastly, the user experience is not great because of the searchability of expired ads..
Referral sites
The new guard are here. It will take all of 2009/10 to establish their offering. But traditional job boards beware. 2Vouch, Hoojano and the like will have a large impact on how the market is shaped for the future and will be targeting the same SME market as you are.
Is hoojano still around? I haven’t heard anything, and no search results on the site
From Mike Wilkinson Hoojano:
HooJano is alive and kicking. We stayed in beta while finalising some commercial arrangements and associated dev, then hit the Christmas lull. Expect announcements next week around our official launch on Jan 12. There will be a nice twist that will back up my confidence that we’ll be around for quite a while longer.
Mike Wilkinson, HooJano.
BTW. 2vouch are having some server problems.
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The requested URL /home.png was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at 2vouch.com Port 80
The 2Vouch server issues could be because they push new features every Wednesday.
Interesting to see what HooJano’s twist is….
Not sure what the problem was but seems to be working fine for us here! We have some challenges ahead this year but we are passionate about the job referral space and share your confidence too Geoff – thanks.
Riges Younan
CEO | 2Vouch
I get the error when redirected from 2vouch.com.au to 2vouch.com. Might want to check that out.
Good luck in ’09 Riges.
all checked and fixed. It will take a day to propagate!!
You looking for a tech support job?
Missed the HooJano announcement on the 12th – what was it?
Geoff, agree with you on your SEEK prediction, and like your MyCareer prediction.
Not sure I see the referral sites getting traction that quickly, it may be that they need to piggyback off someone who already has relevant traffic to get going. Could be someone like LinkMe , but then you risk competing business models
Just posted the latest on Hoojano…
The partnership with MYOB should help them get a leg up.
With the exception of SEEK and CareerOne, the main themes for the year for everyone – recruitment firms and job boards – are going to be the same: survival, customer retention, revenue protection.
Firstly, we’ll see a reduced amount of business model innovation compared to the last few years in the job board space as entrepreneurs become more risk averse. We may also see a reduced pace of product development from the major players as CareerOne waits for the implementation of Monster, MyCareer finds new IT, Product and Marketing teams in Sydney and SEEK focuses on its bottom line.
Secondly, there’ll be a shift in the market segment focus for job boards. The SME market is going to be dead in terms of hiring in a downturn, so I’ll disagree with you that SEEK will focus its attention in that space. SEEK has been chasing the SME market for 8 years now anyway. If anything, I would expect them to slow their efforts in this area and concentrate on customer retention and relationships among the volume recruitment firms which is an area that many recruiters feel has been neglected in the last few years.
All job boards especially SEEK may also be tempted to pursue the corporate / direct market more aggressively, because employers will be looking to cut recruitment fees out of their HR budgets when they need to hire – HR Managers are more likely to go directly to SEEK in 2009 than they are to recruitment firms and SEEK will undoubtedly be taking the opportunity to foster those new relationships.
SEEK also has the most to lose in the volume end of town in the 2009 market while others have the most to gain because of the price differential and the fact that jobseekers are likely to be more desperate and therefore shop around the other sites as well.
Thirdly, I would expect all job boards to enjoy record traffic statistics in 2009 as the unemployment rate rises, and candidate shortages will ease up in many areas for recruitment firms. Translating these traffic gains into revenue is going to be tough: the main game is going to be about getting advertisers and employers to advertise and employ through your job board or recruitment firm.
At number four, a large number of small recruiters will go to the wall and this will compound the decline in ad volumes on job boards.
At number 5, my bold prediction is that job ad volumes on SEEK and CareerOne will halve during 2009 and MyCareer will drop 75%. SEEK Executive and The Big Chair will also struggle to justify their existence as middle management gets cleaned out in the economy and price becomes a major factor in advertising decisions.
At number 6, many of the new model online employment players will not gain the customer support they need to survive, which is a shame as there are some interesting new ideas out there.
At number 7, we’ll see the end game for the enfants terrible of the job board space JobX and Jobsjobsjobs. Hippo will also fold. Byron will survive as ongoing background noise to the industry. Many niche players will fold.
At number 8, social Networks may make a reappearance in the recruitment space after a somewhat discredited relevance in 2008 because everyone will be making their availability known on social networks to a much greater degree as they become more desparate for the next career opportunity. This is going to be particularly true for those who are made redundant where there’ll be no disincentive to publish availability. Some employer brands are going to get tarnished on the social networks as they shed employees.
At number 9, my boldest prediction is about Fairfax’s MyCareer which will be forced to hook up with someone else in Australia.
Rupert Murdoch already publicly excluded the MyCareerOne option at the AGM last year, and the Monster deal has closed that door for Fairfax. SEEK remains an option but its hard to see what SEEK would actually gain except the demise of a competitor and that demise is probably not in their interest since it would strengthen CareerOne as a clear number two and they can probably do nothing and have MyCareer go away anyway.
That leaves CareerBuilder as the best possible saviour for Fairfax’s rivers of gold as MyCareer’s spiral into irrelevance to advertisers increases. I’m reliably informed that they’re already offering $1 per ad deals out there which is the strongest desperation signal sent to advertisers since iProfile offered recruiters equity in return for patronage in 2008.
Fairfax is therefore likely to put all its employment advertising efforts into domain.com.au, their print products and New Zealand’s TradeMe which is a very strong number two player in that market for employment and number one for everything else. They might as well outsource their Australian efforts to Careerbuilder which is a strong players who knows what its doing, have a strong track record of gaining market leadership using online/print hybrids, are well funded and have strong incentives (and public statements of intent) to pursue market presence in Australia.