Schmooze Your Way Into Australia
August 1, 2008 by Geoff Jennings
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…
I’m surprised that someone thinks we’re in the business of selling html chunks.
I thought our customers are buying access to the cv’s of genuine jobseekers, which we are very good at generating for our customers.
Whilst getting into the html vending business sounds somewhat attractive given html’s ready availability, I’m not sure there is great demand in the recruitment industry.
I’m with Smuz here. “Market-leader” Seek simply took the print media model online with little or no added functionality except for that inherently offered by online. They price-gouged the market (sure… they did increase the VOLUME of eyeballs to their ads, but did they increase the QUALITY of those eyeballs??) then sat back to count their money. User-generated content costs them nothing and all they offer for the $$ they charge is a fairly one-dimensional boy-meets-girl (recruiter/employer-meets-jobseeker) platform. Hell, newspapers had been doing that for decades! Now, with a recruitment industry that is growing more and more tired of ever-increasing rates, revenue-not-service driven enhancements, the proliferation of location/industry niche jobsboards and ever-decreasing costs of digital storage, online job postings will inevitably be free in the next few years.
Carey I don’t get your response - I think we’re talking about displaying text and/or display job ads online here, which simply facilitates the boy-meets-girl (jobseeker-contacts-recruiter/employer) with the medium not figuring at all in the final transaction. The reverse (recruiter/employer-contacts-jobseeker) is an entirely different model, both in function and revenue-generating opportunities, and is still finding its feet in the market.
Jobsboards relying for their living solely on employers and recruiters stumping up their hard-earned to have their job ads displayed online have a short sharp shock coming - THE END IS NIGH!
Love it or hate it, the Smuz model is the future.
Hey davidand
We could spend a long time debating all this of course so time will be the judge and I’ll be the very first to acknowledge that you’re right if you find me selling the Big Issue outside your office one day.
I’m not sure how you can be “with Smuz” which is advocating “free” advertising, while also saying advertising is dead.
Perhaps you’re saying that advertising in the form of free aggregation is going to kill paid advertising and therefore ‘THE END IS NIGH’ but that doesn’t correspond well with your position that the whole model is going to do a U-turn. Which one are you really backing here because you can’t back both.
Confusion aside, I do agree with you that anything which is free is either going to end up dead or is going to end up not being free.
Speaking of not being free, I’d contest your accusation that there is price ‘gouging’ going on in the market.
Let me point you in the direction of a $7,000 EGN advertisement before you start on the heavily discounted rates that recruiters are enjoying on job boards. There’s $500 million being spent by your industry on print compared to $200 million online.
As for the boy-meets-girl transaction aspect to the marketplace we’re operating, I’m quite happy to acknowledge that this is exactly what we’re doing. It’s quite clearly what both the jobseeker and the recruitment advertiser want.
For anything else, I think you’ll find recruitment agencies, career counsellors and HR departments simply will always do a much better job of it and we have no intention of moving into any of those spaces - we’ll stick to the advertising knitting.
Cheers Carey, you’ve made a couple of very salient points, but also some points that (with respect) give away your debilitating work environment. I’m fairly new to this but it sounds like you’re a Seek’er so I don’t intend to give away too much market intelligence:
1) Your comment about one day “selling the Big Issue”. I’m not contending that you might soon be out of a job but what I AM saying is that it shouldn’t be long before your salary won’t be derived from job ad revenues - more likely from other (already-established) revenue-generating strategies:
2) Not sure where I’ve said that “advertising is dead”? Quite the opposite. However I HAVE said that I believe the end is nigh for increasingly costly online job ads that are backed by one dimensional and often dysfunctional boy-meets-girl matching systems;
3) “The whole model is going to do a U-turn”. Once again I haven’t said that but I am saying that the REVENUE model is going to turn itself upside-down. Seek shareholders, hang onto your seats!;
4) I’m not even considering $7k EGN press or any press for that matter in this scenario, but I am happy to make a call on this one - employment press (boy-meets-girl stuff) is definitely DEAD!:
5) You’ve gone out on a limb with “my industry” - have you assumed I’m in the recruitment industry just because I’ve got it in for the Seek model? There are plenty of people/industries besides recruiters who think Seek are over-charging and under-delivering!
6) Here you’ve hit on the guts of the issue… if you (Seek??) are happy delivering a boy-meets-girl solution, and you are confident that that is all recruiters want from online, then it’s definitely time to expand your horizons, or at least do some serious market and industry research.
davidand, you make some good points and I think the job board industry in Australia is ready for a shake up. It won’t be easy though as seek can ‘do a Microsoft’ and use their market position to squash potential competitors. One thing is for sure though, no one is happy with the current situation (except Seek shareholders). Recruiters don’t like the high prices and low quality candidates dished up. Job seekers hate being treated like a meat and screwed around by lazy recruiters (this is not Seeks fault but they encourage it because recruiters are their main revenue, rather than trying to fix it).
Thanks Craig. The only problem with Seek “doing a Microsoft” on a well-funded competitor who decides to take the free ad route would be that they would have to get down and dirty with them, and that would surely give analysts and shareholders apoplexy!
Rupert Murdoch has done it (given papers away free) in the US and UK to blunt a competitor but of course he has a massive global business behind him to subsidise such antics - Seek only has Seek.
By the way, I’m not predicting the demise of Seek here - only the demise of their model.
James Packer a shareholder in Seek would have some decent dollars to throw at the war chest if needed.
The Seek model in Australia is a pretty solid one for the next 1 -3 years. After that I would predict the ATS providers like Page Up People and the aggregators will dominate the market. Probably owned by Seek Ltd by then.
Other sites that will do well will be….(I can’t tell you about that one just yet, in development by me).
Geoff no doubt he would be prepared to throw some $$ Seek’s way but at the end of the day I imagine that any Packer business would have to stand up to scrutiny and produce a sustainable ROI, or else!
Yep, I would give the Seek model max 2 years. User-generated (and so user-owned) content will be usurped by the aggregators who will generate $$ from areas other than job ads, which will be FREE!
This is all great speculation which does not seem to be supported by the available data.
The basic reality is that traffic to ‘traditional’ job boards appears to be growing, not shrinking. Ad volumes on all ‘traditional’ job boards are growing not shrinking. Revenues on all the major job boards are growing, not shrinking.
In the meantime, industry observers will have seen seven different ‘free’ heavily backed well- funded advertising offerings come to Australia in the employment space the last three years, during which time adoption of ‘traditional’ job boards has grown, and the penetration of free advertising has failed to materialise.
Some new ‘traditional’ entrants have received a small amount of jobseeker attention and are not expected to change the game but it should be acknowledged that even they have received more tration than the “free” players.
You might of course question what the hundreds of employees at SEEK, MyCareer and CareerOne do all day and I think you’ll find that there are quite a few of them who spend their time quite carefully researching what jobseekers and advertisers want. Its not as if each of these players doesn’t have formidable well funded competition - the notion that SEEK or anyone else is simply sitting on their laurels counting the pennies is simply naive.
If jobseekers and advertisers were interested in abandoning the advertising model in favour of some other model, you would be absolutely sure someone at SEEK, MyCareer or CareerOne would have noticed, and stolen the available marketshare or changed the game.
So I’d question the assertion that “no-one is happy in the current situation” - I’m not sure we’re actually in a ’situation’ and the numbers certainly don’t back that up.
All that is not to say that change is not upon us.
I don’t believe that after 100 years of advertising, the advertising model is simply going to disappear - we’re still in fairly early days of seeing a shift from print to online, and job boards are yet to fully maximise the new medium.
I do agree with you that product progress for ‘traditional’ job boards after the first 10 years is starting to occur. The first 10 years of job boards was about delivering a much greater quantity of applications compared with other media. Trends in the U.S. seem to indicate that the emphasis is shifting now towards the quality of application on the advertiser side, and quality of job content on the jobseeker side.
Technology can in some ways assist this process but the real change needs to occur in the advertiser community who have yet to provide the quality of data or adopt some of the excellent opportunities the internet medium provides. I think this is likely to take some time.
In response to this change, you’re already seeing steps by SEEKand indeed other Australian job boards. We’ve made very significant investments in search technology, user experience practice, web analytics to drive better quality outcomes for both parties. We’re also delivering initiatives to greatly increase the volume of salary and location data in job content, video in ads, upgrading our classifications structure and a whole number of other initiatives designed to increase the relevance of job content to jobseekers and the relevance of applications to advertisers.
In short, while customer need for quality will drive improvements to job boards over the next few years, the signs are simply not pointing towards a 100% change in the entire recruitment value chain.
Ive tried a ton of free sites and as much as I want to use them, they all suck. Its keyword search technology wrapped around a crappy UI. No advanced features…I cant do it.