Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

With Google apparently burning the midnight oil working on providing online classified listings search of all types – including vertical Internet job search – to its users, the question I ask myself is "What will this new offering look like?"

Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch is predicting Google will combat eBay and Craigslist by allowing advertisers to pay a "small" fee to post products for sale. Think eBay without the auctions and the high fees and Craigslist without the spam.

Francisco says, "… it wouldn’t be a big leap for Google to let users list an item for sale much as they post an advertisement today."

Letting users advertise items for sale on Google would no doubt be a potential death-blow for eBay’s current business-as-usual monopoly.

However, this begs the next question: Will Google charge employers to post jobs?

I’m going to go with a resounding "No" on this one – at least for the near term. Choosing to charge employers to post jobs is essentially providing nothing more than a Yahoo! / HotJobs model. Not smart.

I believe Google will aggregate jobs from a variety of sources – job boards, online classifieds and corporate career centers – to fill content for a vertical job search engine. And I think they’ll do it for free.

Word on the street is Google is quietly talking with Monster and the other big boards to get their blessing to scrape job content. The decision to allow Google to aggregate job content is a Catch 22, as free job listings on Google represents the writing on the wall of their eventual demise, but also represents nice traffic flow for the time being.

Oh, what to do? Well, think about a newspaper deciding not to have its stories aggregated by, and searchable on Google. Would you want to lose that traffic? Neither does Monster, CareerBuilder or HotJobs.

For a period, employers will no doubt continue to use Monster and other pricey solutions out of habit. However, as time passes, and employers realize the ways to post their jobs at no cost (preferably from their own Web sites (hello ATS providers and dot-jobs!)), more and more will jump ship from the S.S. Monster.

Job boards will find that utilizing Google’s pay-per-click solution will become an even more vital part of driving traffic and brand awareness from their competition than it is today. More money in Google’s pocket.

Google’s model has always been providing quality results for free. They then make their buckets of money by allowing advertisers to be in front of this targeted search audience, a la pay-per-click advertising solutions.

Why should the way they serve vertical job search or online job listings be any different?

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