Latest Jobs

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
Strategy Analyst, Melbourne
Solutions Architect, Melbourne Has Seek company video.

MyCareer.com.au
Client Relationship Manager, Brisbane
Sales Coordinator, Melbourne
Maybe a new Marketing Manager soon

JobsJobsJobs.com.au
Business Development Manager/Sales Executive, Melbourne
Appointment Setter, Melbourne

Linkme.com.au
Test Should take down your test jobs, oops.

Employment Market Shake-up.

I’m an optimist.  Can’t help it.  It’s part of my make-up.  I don’t hold a high regard on always being happy, though.  I reckon you need bad times to challenge your strength, just like the immune system needs the odd germ to strengthen it.

There is a fair amount of talk at present about the state of global financial health.  Most of it’s pretty dire.   As a result, companies are getting nervous about their economic well-being.  Staff are lying low and getting on with the job.  There are lots of stats, not facts.  I’m going to regurgitate a few, and would ask that you decide of your own reading of them.  I’ll give you my opinion at the end.  But as I warned you…I’m an optimist:

According to Seek.com.au the Australian employment market has eased further in October.

Despite much speculation however, there were no signs of an abrupt response to the deepening global financial crisis that might signify a developing recession.

Nationally the SEEK Employment Index (SEI), which measures the ratio of new job ads on seek.com.au to job applications via the site, fell by 4% in seasonally adjusted terms, suggesting jobseekers may have witnessed increased competition for fewer available jobs.

However, despite the global financial crisis deepening, this rate was consistent with the average rate of decline seen since December 2007 (4.5%).

However, Seek Ltd themselves have downgraded their forecast for profit growth to zero. Net profit after tax, which last year saw a 37.4% rise to $76.3 million, is now forecast to be flat.

News Corp has flagged job cuts, after reporting a 29.6 per cent drop in first quarter profit and it’s likely that Fairfax is also felling the pinch…

So what does this all mean for the online recruitment market.  Here’s what I reckon…Seek will have to make some changes they might not otherwise have considered.  Strategies must change, even if a little.  Will this open up opportunities for niche job boards to gain a foothold in the market?   Possibly.  And if this happens, what a great opportunity is a recession (no Keating comparisons, please).

Point is, sometimes nothing beats a good old dose of the flu.

Classifind.com.au Tackling Jobs, Cars And Real Estate…

Thomas Shaw referred me to a new vertical search engine, so I thought I would would give it a road test.

Although not fully functional, I like the fact that they are pioneering the aggregation of the three classified categories, Jobs, Cars and Real Estate. Cars and Real Estate have received little attention from the aggregators and I wonder if the market leaders, Carsales.com.au and Realestate.com.au will apply the same ‘Don’t scrape us’ policy that Seek have?

On the surface, Classifind looks simple enough to use, opting to go with a full search box for each vertical on their home page. Most other aggregators use keyword only searches. However beware the results may take a while to appear - if at all.

Search results contain jobs by the usual suspects, CareerOne, Mycareer, Jobx e.t.c and redirect to the chosen site through another window.

You can also set up alerts for all the verticals.  These notify the recipient via email or sms when a listing matches their saved profile.

That’s all great but where’s the advertising?   How will Classifind survive without Adsense?

Site owner, Matt Ford, ex White Agency and Yahoo, seems to be relying on performance only for his revenue.

“Classifind is proud to offer a performance based marketing opportunity through an aggregated search site. If you would like to include listings from your job, car or property board on the classifind site please contact us below”.

As previously discussed, this service needs a mega amount of traffic and participation to generate any type of decent revenue.  It’ll be fascinating to watch the progress of this progressive company.

SimplyHired Heads Downunder

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.

Back From My Tour Of Europe

So I’m back from my tour.  I’ve slept, eaten an huge bowl of veges, and ready to resume where I left off.

Nothing catastrophic happened in my absence, but there are a few points I’d like to draw your attention to.

Firstly, a recent Seek survey indicated:

67% of jobseekers are concerned about their current job or career in light of the global economic slowdown according to research from SEEK Intelligence. In a sign that employee confidence is dropping rapidly, when asked the same question in August only 39% of respondents were feeling worried. 

59% of respondents are feeling less secure in their job now compared to 12 months ago, nearly double the number of jobseekers who felt this way in August (31%) 

71% of people think that it will take them longer to find a job now compared to 12 months ago, a massive jump from 39% when the question was posed in August and an even bigger increase from the 29% recorded in 2007

Happiness levels in relation to the respondent’s job continue to decrease, with only 22% of respondents describing themselves as happy (down from 27% in August and 29% in 2007)

These aren’t great results for participants in the survey - but I’m sorry to report that the leverage recruiters can receive from employee dissatisfaction is considerable, especially in a candidate-tight market.

Also, it is important for us as recruiters to keep a picture of the overall feeling of the market place.  If security is a key concern of employees, then this can be used as a selling point in the dance of wooing candidates into various positions.

Secondly, Thomas Shaw, owner of Recruitment Directory, and one of our regular contributors, recently acquired the niche job board digitalindustryjobs.com from its existing UK owners. Here’s to hoping he didn’t pay too much for this as the exchange rate of the pound in relation to the $AUD is not great. However the revenue potential when converted back could work well.

Thirdly, MyCareer is still A/B testing their job search functionality. This has been happening for a number of months now. A decision should be made sooner than later as jobseekers will start to get confused.

Finally.  Seek remains the market leader. Their key drivers remain consistent:

1. Grow Volume of job ads

2. Grow yield

3. Introduce new products

Why change the strategy when you have financial results like these:

$M

 

(Seek presentation to UBS conference)

And I swear, I’m not receiving cash for comments from Seek.  There’s not much I can give these folks a hard time about, though.   The praise I give them is well-deserved.

 

 

Special Offer or Spam?

Whilst you may not agree with everything I write, betcha no one out there is gonna raise a holler about my bagging of spam. Hate it. It’s illegal. And in this world where time is a highly-valued commodity, a spammer’s almost up there with drug-pushers, politicians and parking inspectors as the lowest of the low.

Having said that, it’s interesting that Jobs (powered by JobX) has decided to walk the rocky boundary between legitimate communication with registered clients and plain old stinky spam.

I get a plethora of emails like this from Jobs (note that, rather ironically, one is entitled “how much is your time worth”.

A bit of research on my part has revealed that they have been sent by convicted spammer Wayne Mansfield.

Officially, these emails are not spam. But they smell the same.

Geoff - How Much Is Your Time Worth

SPECIAL OFFER to JOBS registered clients

As part of our continuing Value Added Offerings to our clients, we have negoatiated a special rate for Australia’s most popular Time Management seminar - Effective Time Management.

If you act quickly, you can secure your place at one of the seminars being presented across Australia from September 8th through 11th, 2008 at a 33% discount to the normal recommended retail price. So instead of $167 you pay ONLY $111.

Claim your discount by entering this code in the space usually provided for your web address on the online booking form: JOBSSEPT2008

Offers expires September 2nd, 2008 5pm Western Standard Time.
______________________________

__________________________

“Burnt out, stressed out, rundown and tired? Out of balance; out of control?
Frustrated with wheel spinning? Too much to do; not enough time to do it.”

What you need is a way to learn….

EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT

 

Blah, blah…

Business Seminars Australia
Excellence in Business Education
Perth Western Australia… as close as you get to Paradise on Earth
Email: wayne.mansfield@gmail.com visit us at wayne.mansfield@gmail.com visit us at www.au1865.com or
www.waynemansfield.com
Australia’s best seminar schedule is at www.stumpjump.net
Phone: (+61 9221 0922 Fax: (+61 9221 0933

http://www.linkedin.com/in/waynemansfield

Business Seminars Australia
Celebrating 21 years in Business Education
ABN: 45 119 694 558
Postal: P.O. Box 6Ø99, East Perth W.A. 6892
Phone: (Ø8) 9463 78Ø7 Fax: (Ø8) 9463 78Ø8

Business Seminars Australia Plus Offers Update
The Maverick Spirit

This is being sent to: ??????@gmail.com
This advice is being sent to people who have registered at a JOBS
website and therefore have supplied their contact information by
subscribing to one of JOBS or its asscoiated companies services.

This particular communication is a special offer to people who have
registered at a JOBS website.

 

 

 

 

CareerJet: Landing At An Airport Near You…

I received this email from job search engine CareerJet.com.au about getting my jobs listed on their site. Here’s some of what it said:

Job listing fees: Fees are efficacy-based: they depend upon the amount of job seekers redirected towards your site from Careerjet.

You only pay for the listings that are viewed from our site. This is when a candidate interested by one of your offers clicks on the job title found on Careerjet and is redirected towards this offer on your site.

Unit price per click per job seeker: AU$0.05 net

As soon as your Careerjet advertiser account is credited, your offers will be listed and the candidate traffic will begin.

When your account runs out of credit, your listings are immediately downgraded, and then suspended. Topping up your account reactivates your listings.

Advertiser accounts do not involve contractual time obligations: for instance, we do not charge for keeping your advertiser account open and inactive as long as you like until you have more jobs that you would like to list.

Your advertiser account gives you access to the statistics for all the candidate clicks that Careerjet redirects to your site. Upon request, the tracker system can be added to your URL.

Some Careerjet statistics:

Number of monthly visits in Australia: 470000
Number of job offers listed in Australia: 248000
The Careerjet network operates in more than 50 countries:
http://www.careerjet.com.au/?worldwide

It’s kinda interesting that they say they have 248000 jobs listed in Australia without Seek’s jobs.

I did a search on .Net in Australia and two of the first three listings for jobs were not in Australia. I’m not a statistician. And I know that my sample was a small one. Probably if I checked the next 200 hundred listings, and just to give Careerjet the benefit of the doubt, I’d get Australian jobs for most of these.

But I wasn’t exactly buoyed by my initial search. Are the users on Careerjet Australians? Or are they mainly international job seekers. And if the answer to the final question is “yes” why am I being charged 5cents per click for irrelevant traffic?

It gets curiouser and curiouser. Are MyCareer and CareerOne being charged per click for the jobs they have listed?

Or is Careerjet just one big Madhatter’s Tea Party?

Subscription based Jobs

Would you pay to view/apply for a job? There are a few niche sites charging 25 cents a day for access to their job content.

FreelanceSwitch.com is one of these. It’s a site for freelancers to view job opportunities. Trouble is, to view the contact details it costs $7 p/month. They have only 136 jobs on the site with a small % from Australia.

Also the site for the creative industry ArtsHub.com.au is another that charges 25 cents per day to join ($40 - $80 per job to post for members also). They boast 50,000 creative professionals and more than 600 organisations and businesses worldwide.

I have trouble understanding (besides getting discounts to festivals e.t.c. on Arts Hub) why someone would pay to apply to jobs when we have 200,000+ jobs out there that are FREE to apply for??

Sales Letter or Spam Mail?

Today I received a letter from Rec Radar, inviting me to make an appointment with their sales team. Rec Radar is an online trading system for recruiters, used when they are having difficulty finding candidates for jobs. A nice idea, yes.

But here’s the rub. Rec Radar isn’t the only company to do this, but I’m going to scapegoat them. Firstly, the “sales letter” is addressed directly to the apply@onlinerecruitment email address, but it is addressed “To The Management Team”. How hard is it to find my name and use it in the address?

And I don’t want to be a pedant. I’m pretty sure that a quick perusal of my website and blog will reveal several typos. However, this letter looks as though it is written by someone for whom English is not their first language. In truth, my primary-school-aged kids have a better grip on the correct use of the capital letter than the folks who composed the letter I received.

It’s old advice but sound. If you are going to represent yourself to a potential client, use their name and do your best to use the language properly. Der.

From: peter@recradar.com
Subject: Rec Radar
Date: 10 June 2008 7:23:35 AM
To: apply@onlinerecruitment.com.au

To the Management Team,

I would like to introduce Rec Radar® to you.

Rec Radar® is a secure web based networking tool for ethical and professional recruitment agencies to work together for mutual advantage.

Rec Radar is an automated online trading system. It’s an advanced two directional management tool, Similar in style to E-bay, But only for recruiters in the recruitment industry.

The service enables agencies to earn commission from trading jobs and candidates with other agencies that they would have struggled to fill or place themselves.

In your account, you can list the jobs for which you want to find candidates you can also upload details of candidates for which you want to find jobs.

You protect your agency identity and business by working in a secure, confidential environment. You only release your candidate details to another agency when you want to and you never release your client.

With Rec Radar® you will always have plan B

For a limited time during the launch in Sydney the first 6 months membership for all your consultants is free.

We will be in Sydney from the 16th-19th June and soon after we will be in Melbourne and would like to meet and show you through Rec Radar®. So please check out www.RecRadar.com

Feel free to contact us with a time that is suitable.

Regards,

Peter Fowler
Managing Director

Skype: Rec Radar
peter@recradar.com
www.recradar.com

Job Board Traffic Update

According to Nielsen//NetRatings Australia, CareerOne’s traffic as of 25 May 08 is at 1,046,351 unique browsers (UBs). That’s 162,333 UBs ahead of MyCareer and over 1.3 million behind Seek.

MyCareer’s latest TV campaign seems to be a fizzer and not propelling them into second place over C1, as they would have hoped.

CareerOne’s sitting in its dream position - pity it’s your dream position too, MyCareer!

Next Page »