Two Internet Goliaths are facing big weeks. Both eBay and Google are preparing to host their analysts meetings.
EBay, a 10-year-old company, is worth $50 billion, while 7-year-old Google is worth $54 billion. (The larger valuation is due to the fact that Google’s revenue generation is projected to overtake eBay’s via end-of-year projections.)
Although both seem quite different, they are beginning to cross-over into each others competitive turfs.
Recently raising its prices for listing merchandise, eBay has spurred a backlash amongst its faithful. Believe it or not, eBay sellers are apparently planning a strike from Feb. 18-25. Yes, a strike on eBay!
As part of this backlash, many sellers are flocking to Google’s AdWords program to sell their wares, as well as Overture. Why spend the money to have an eBay store and list hundreds of items when you can pay about $20 a month to have your own site and drive traffic via search engines?
No doubt, eBay used to be the undisputed king of selling anything and everything online. But the times they are a changin’. People are wising up to other options.
Here’s my connection to recruiting:
One day, recruiters will wise-up too. Knowing that all job boards drive traffic via search, then why not take out the middleman and advertise your openings directly on those same search engines?
Let’s break it down. If an employer posts 10 jobs on Monster, it’s going to cost about $3,500. However, if a recruiter buys into a pay-per-click program, driving traffic to their own site, they’re paying a much smaller price to direct job seekers to all their jobs. (The more jobs a recruiter has, the more this strategy makes sense.)
In our example, let’s say each job on Monster gets 500 views. For that, a company is paying about 70 cents per view. Starting at 5 cents per click on Google, an employer could have promoted the same 10 jobs, and driven the same amount of traffic, for about $250.
Three-thousand dollars vs. $250. If you’re a recruiter, think about that for a moment.
Eventually, just like eBay sellers, recruiters are going to get wise to their various options to drive traffic to their openings. And like those eBay sellers, I believe recruiters are going to flock to search engines.
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