Schmooze Your Way Into Australia

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…