Seek Delivers
August 18, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 6 Comments
There’s good money still to be had in the traditional job board model. If you are Seek. They finished the financial year with total sales up 34% to $210.2 million. Nice.
Not hard to see why. Even their competitors are advertising with them…
Schmooze Your Way Into Australia
August 1, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 10 Comments
Virginia based aggregator Smuz.com (powered by Indeed.com) is looking at integrating with a job search engine in the Australian market. Any takers?
A quick look at the site reveals an unimpressive design but an impressive amount of jobs available. Smuz is boasting about 500,000 uvs so far. The site only launched in March of this year and is FREE to post on.
A quick chat with founder Paul Pickthorne reveals his optimism for this type of service catching on here in the same way it has in the US.
Pickthorne reckons the move towards aggregators is inevitable and that the business of selling job ads (essentially a page of html) for hundreds of dollars will inevitably die. Bandwidth and storage cost pennies compared to a decade ago and the move online to free services is well established and irresistible to most users.
He hopes sites like Seek.com.au will realise that they are turning down free traffic. This is what’s happened with job boards in the US. Ultimately, the job ad copyright isn’t owned by the job board but by the employer who wrote it and they want as many eyeballs as possible. Seek.com.au runs the risk of becoming less valuable as a vendor to employers as more people move to the job search engines. Indeed now has more job seeker traffic than Monster in the US.
Smuz generates revenue from: the Adsense ads found all over the site; from payment from Indeed for traffic they send to their sponsored jobs and from the traffic with affiliate programs with other sites that have complementary services.
It will be interesting to watch how this plays out…
Directing Traffic
February 4, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 5 Comments
Statistics are king in businesses such as online job boards, where success or failure is measured by the amount of traffic to a site.However, there are two methods of collecting data used by the online recruitment industry in Australia.
The industry standard is the panel-based methodology used by Nielson/NetRatings. This tracks data from a panel of about 400 consumers. They report the stats to the market on a monthly basis. As data relies on subscription at a fee, several of the smaller job boards, such as JobX and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs do not participate in this form of data collection.
Alternatively, Hitwise Australia collects data directly from ISP networks. Stats from Hitwise are updated on an hourly basis. The data from this method is therefore more raw and “real-time”. It gives the stats-geeks a chance to analyse the comings and goings of consumers, peak times for views etc, providing an excellent opportunity to better understand consumer practices. Hitwise data is not reliant on individual job board subscription, as is the case with the NetRatings data. However, this data excludes any information from the Telstra ISP networks.
First up, let’s all agree on this: before any one method can be considered the industry standard, it should include data from all possible sources. Therefore, both methods currently in use are deficient in this regard. Hitwise, for its exclusion of Telstra data, and NetRatings for its exclusion of minor job board data.
Arguably, the effect on the data purity of these two deficiencies differs. The NetRatings data gives us no indication whatever of the popularity of the minor sites. It is merely indicative of the popularity of the three main players, Seek, CareerOne and MyCareer. However, the Hitwise data, while excluding a whack of info from the Telstra ISP, allows us a snapshot of where all the industry competitors sit in popularity. It would be difficult to contend that a greater portion of consumers of any one site would be more likely to be Telstra ISP customers. Therefore, as the exclusion affects both the big and smaller players, while it alters quantity of data, it probably does not alter the quality of it.Whatever method of data collection one considers, if we have a look at the figures for January, Seek is the undisputed market leader.CareerOne have seen a better- than- average traffic rise than their close competitors MyCareer and have assumed the number two position. If this was due to spending more dollars on advertising then MyCareer can quickly buy back the number two spot in February.
However, when we consider the popularity of Linkme for the month, there is a conflict between the two data. Linkme have dropped off the NetRatings list with a 97% decline. However HitWise shows a rise in their traffic and rankings. This discrepency may be due to the launch of the new site in January. NetRatings is possibly still tracking the old one and Linkme have moved on.Admittedly, there are several other factors to be considered in the question of success and failure of the job boards. These include: number of c.v.’s on their databases, how many job alert emails go out each day and how good are the quality of applications. Volume isn’t always better.
However when looking at popularity alone, based on the above, we need to challenge the idea that NetRatings is the industry standard of popularity rating for the recruitment industry. But, even if we all concur that a new metric is required for the measure of popularity, will we ever be able to agree on how that measure should be derived?
New Look Linkme.
January 28, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
Before: ( Snap shot has some formatting errors)
After:
The new design is an improvement and the logo has also been brought up to date. The new features that have been added revolve around giving the candidate more control over their visibility. The basic settings allow you to choose how much the employers/recruiters can see about you. The advanced settings are the same thing but for friends and other members.Basic Settings:
Advanced Settings:
The job search seems to have missed out on the overhall and is still one of Linkme’s worst features – perhaps this will receive some attention in the next update…Overall it still feels a bit underdone. It’s a plain, simple site which is doing an OK job at offering advertisers an up-to-date candidate database.
