Live Recruitment Rumble – May 7th, 11:00am
April 30, 2009 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
There’s nothing like a good stoush.
And frankly, while I like nothing better than a good old jab at industry players like job boards and recruiters, I reckon it’s about time I took on one of my own kind.
So, rally around the shelter shed, peoples, it’s gonna be a bewdy. (details here)
Join online recruitment industry leaders Geoff Jennings and Thomas Shaw for a LIVE “Recruitment Rumble” Thursday May 7th, 11:00am – 12:00pm. All gloves will be off as Geoff and Thomas go head to head in a discussion about key topics (Geoff may even wear his shiny purple boxing shorts).
Joining in the live discussion is Diane Lee, founder of Even It Up! providing a perspective from the job seeker point of view and “outsider” to the industry.
Topics for discussion include:
- Future of the traditional Job board?
- SEEK vs. CareerOne/Monster – who will win?
- Fake job adverts?
- RCSA: Soft as a marshmellow?
- Should I use a recruitment agency or go direct?
- Background searching candidates online?
Do you want to listen or join in the discussion? Register here.
Geoff Jennings is the controversial man at the helm of http://www.geoffjennings.com, a site dedicated to keeping the recruitment bastards honest. He has worked for online industry leaders and is currently Managing Director of www.onlinerecruitment.com.au
Thomas Shaw is the “pretty boy” of online recruitment, having established his stranglehold of the industry via his blog www.recruitmentdirectory.com.au/blog By day he works in the recruitment industry, and at night a tweet from Thomas can make or break your organisation.
Diane Lee is the founder of Even It Up! which aims to provide information about recruitment practices for Australian jobseekers. Diane is leading the revolt from frustrated job seekers who want an even playing field www.evenitup.com.au
2009 Predictions
January 6, 2009 by Geoff Jennings · 10 Comments
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.
Latest Jobs
December 16, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
Seek
Strategy Analyst- Melbourne (New)
Solutions Architect – Melbourne
Commercial Partner Manager – Melbourne
Online Recruitment
Senior Character Artist – Sydney
Recruitment
Consultant – Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne
3D Artist – Sydney
Experienced Games Programmer – Melbourne/Brisbane
Latest Jobs
November 15, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
OnlineRecruitment.com.au
Lead Programmer – Games, Brisbane/Melbourne
Texture Artist – Games, Brisbane/Melbourne
Recruitment Consultant, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne
Seek.com.au
Online Media Sales Representative – 12 month maternity cover, Sydney
National Credit Manager – Melbourne
Linkme.com.au
Business Development Manager – NSW
MyCareer.com.au
Client Relationship Manager, Brisbane
Sales Coordinator, Melbourne
SimplyHired Heads Downunder
October 29, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 8 Comments
Those of us in the online recruitment industry have been waiting the arrival of a major global player in the jobs aggregation space into Australia.
Simply Hired the Mountain View, CA-based jobs service has made the plunge. Not simply stopping with Australia they have also launched:
Canada (www.SimplyHired.ca), the United Kingdom (www.SimplyHired.co.uk), Australia (www.SimplyHired.com.au) and India (www.SimplyHired.co.in).
The aggregation market has seen a lot of small fish come and go, resulting in its general lack of success. The idea’s a good one, though, and perhaps a larger player will be able to support this enterprise better than a smaller one. The reason for my hypothesis is simply centered on the financial backing a bigger enterprise might have to promote the product. Aggregation does not yield massive revenue without massive traffic. The difficulty is that, without promotion (and therefore funding), massive traffic is unlikely to occur.
Online Recruitment Industry Jobs
September 7, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · Comments Off
Monday morning’s peak time for job-hunters, so I thought I’d start this week off by highlighting some of the available online recruitment industry jobs. So, for those of you who can’t stand the thought of another week of the same old, same old, check these out:
Business Development / Sales Executive – JobsJobsJobs
We are on the search for a sales professional to join our team in Sydney.
Business Development Manager - LinkMe – Neutral Bay, NSW
$60,000 to $100,000; Full time; Neutral Bay NSW 2089
Graphic Designer – LinkMe – St Kilda, Vic
An exciting new role has been created to support both the Development and Marketing teams of LinkMe
Senior Strategy Analyst – Seek
Work for SEEK, an entrepreneurial, market leading company
Plenty more roles at Seek. Click here
Drop me a line if I have missed any. Email: gjennings(at)onrec.com.au
2Vouch Goes Beta
September 1, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 1 Comment
I’ve discussed 2vouch on this Onrec blog already back in February Vouching For 2Vouch . Today they launched in Beta. Congratulations.
Social referral sites such as 2vouch and Hoojano(which launched some months back) will be a prominent aspect of how we recruit into the future. The idea is nothing new, as indicated by the old adage 2vouch has chosen to adopt as their motto, “It’s not what you know…” (initially they had a genie as part of their campaign. I wanna know where the genie’s gone:)). Being social creatures, we communicate with one another. Being creatures ruled by the ego, we like to be “in the loop”, and being creatures driven by economic concerns, we like to make money. 2vouch satisfies all the needs.
Recruiters pay referral fees to people who give them a lead on a placement. 2vouch is merely formalising this already-existing convention.
Online recruitment has placed some jobs on 2vouch, to give it a go. Stay tuned for how that’s tracking…I wish, I wish (picture me rubbing the magic lantern here) for several successful job placements….
Where’s the Genie??
Old School Meets New School
March 6, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 3 Comments
An alliance between JobX.com.au and social networking site, friendsreunited.com.au was announced today.
JOBX will provide FriendsReunited.com.au a full white label of its technology and functionality, including powering and launching the FriendsReunited.com.au jobs portal.
Good on ‘em. JobX has done the right thing in that, prior to spending squillions on marketing, it’s building some strategic alliances.This’ll help friendsreunited, too. Friendsreuinited is old school, web1.0, whereas JobX is more web2.0, giving its counterpart a bit more wizz-bang.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs Health Check.
March 6, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 8 Comments
“We think that we can create the number-two job board in Australia within 12 months, which really means knocking off MyCareer and CareerOne, and we think that we can be a third of the size of Seek within three years.”
-Guy Sigston (smart company magazine, 20 Feb., 2007)
It’s nearly a year on for Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Call it an early happy birthday present if you like, but I reckon they’re about due for a little health check.Let’s start with the positive. The site has pretty good functionality. It remembers the user and returns the upon entry to their last viewing point. Handy stuff. And not that it really matters so much, but the site is aestetically slick and easy to navigate – a welcome break from some stuff I’ve been looking at lately.Okay.
On to Guy’s quote. See, the problem is, if you’re going to go to the media with big claims, you wanna be pretty sure that you can see the claims through. Based on this idea, Guy Sigston was pretty…um…stupid. Sure, you left Jobs, Jobs, Jobs rather “abruptly”, but you’re back now and I reckon all the hooha is no excuse for not making good your inflated promise, Guy.
Let’s have a look at how things are tracking…According to Hitwise Australia February 08 market share, Seek holds 25% of the market, and CareerOne and MyCareer, 8.7% and 7.3%, respectively. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs has NOT EVEN 1% OF MARKET SHARE. I don’t wanna kick you when you’re down, and frankly, I wouldn’t be expecting much more than what you’ve achieved in such a short time. The thing I have an issue with is your public escalation of expectations. Don’t tell folks that you’ll be number two in a year, don’t tell folks that you’ll be a third of the size of Seek in three years, unless you have a bloody good plan for how this will be achieved.Say we let ‘em off the hook for the Guy comment. Say we’re in a benevolent mood and we’re prepared to allow a pretty humungous margin of error…where do we go from here?
Archie Mills, my friendly telesales rep. from Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, led me to the answer to this question. Archie was pretty keen to get my business by setting up a meeting with one of the sales team. I’m pretty busy, though, and won’t go to meetings unless I’m pretty sure it’s going to be fruitful for me (this is the reason I’m self-employed, goddam). I asked Archie for some info about the job board and he sent me an email, jam-packed full of claims. Most of them were pruely propaganda. For instance, “We offer better value”. Der, Arch. Then there was this one “57% growth in the past two months” That one bugged me a bit, considering that January is the comeback month for job boards. I wanted clarification on that point, “How does this compare with the growth of the competing job boards” and “What is the source of the statistics”, I asked my new friend Archie – twice. No reply. That was a few weeks ago.
Looks like Jobs, Jobs, Jobs is up to their old tricks again.
.asia Landrush Kicks Off Today
February 21, 2008 by Geoff Jennings · 1 Comment
The Landrush phase for .Asia domain names started at about 10p.m. last night our time. It ends on the 12th March 2008. What this means is that any member of the general public can apply for webestate in Asia. If uncontested, the space is yours. If it is contested, you will be asked to enter a bidding process for ownership.
The timing of the Landrush didn’t aid my already well-documented insomnia as I spent the good part of last night buying up on Asian webestate. It was worth the dark patches under my eyes this morning. This is the kind of opportunity folks are witness to only every few generations. It represents the chance to be a pioneer on untouched land. It’s great to see that Seek, Career Builder and Montser have secured their slice of Asian cyberspace, but where were the other players? C’mon guys, surely you’re not that hung up on your need for beauty sleep?
