more on yahoo!’s entry into vertical job search
July 6th, 2005
The occurrence of Yahoo! providing vertical job search via HotJobs is quite possibly, in my opinion, the most significant news to come along in the online recruitment space in a very long time.
What Yahoo! has said with this move is: The job board model as we know it today doesn’t work. Let me repeat that, The
job board model doesn’t work.
For more, listen below (4 mins.):
July 6th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
Joel, perhaps i’m misinterpreting your comment, but i think you may be over-reaching with the “job boards don’t work” soundbite.
what i think you mean is that “job boards that depend exclusively on paid listings don’t work” and/or “job boards that depend on being an exclusive primary portal destination don’t work”. still not sure either of those perspectives are completely accurate, but i think perhaps they’re more on target than the sweeping categorical statement you make above.
that said, the industry trend over the past few years has been an explosion of smaller job boards with a variety of successful strategies (some for profit, others not) around geographic, industry, and occupational niche focus areas. in fact, you could make the strong argument that THIS is the real shift in the landscape — the “long tail of jobs” is growing longer, and growing fatter.
what i believe you may be observing is that the majors in the space (Monster, CareerBuilder, and Yahoo HotJobs) will need to innovate and/or modify their business models so as to continue being viable and relevant in the market.
while i agree the current paid listings business is under pressure, i don’t believe that Monster or CareerBuilder are going away anytime soon. they will continue to be primary destinations with large amounts of traffic and resulting revenue.
furthermore, i think smaller boards will still have a bright future with focused strategies around their niches (though whether paid listings is the primary revenue stream in the future is certainly a valid question). adsense and other revenue opportunities will continue to emerge.
long-term i think there will continue to be a profusion of data sources for job listings, and this reflects a similar explosion of data sources in other verticals like shopping, travel, and news.
so be it: may a thousand flowers bloom ;)
- dave mcclure
www.simplyhired.com
July 6th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
What I probably should have said is “job search as we know it.” When I refer to “job boards” I mean the current model that you refer to above.
I disagree with your notion that a large number of players will thrive on any significant level. Sure, there will be niche players that make a living, but they will be the exception.
In the days when newspapers ruled the job listing search landscape, it was a nice and easy monopoly of information. Every job seeker knew exactly where to go.
Today, clutter litters the landscape. I think a central place for job content (heck, all information) is what the public wants. The success of Google lies in great part to its ability to be a central clearing house for data.
I think that notion progressing to job / classified listings is natural and inevitable.
Sure, alligators and sharks survived a great extinction, but they were the exception and not the rule.
July 6th, 2005 at 10:28 pm
Yahoo! HotJobs lets loose
There’s a lot of speculation on internet today surrounding the Yahoo! HotJobs launch of a web search engine for jobs….
July 7th, 2005 at 9:40 am
How far will it go?
Just to offer a slightly differing opinion, here’s my take on the situation:
As already commented on, yes, this is way forward for online recruitment – at a basic level job-seekers want to find one place (that is nice and simple to use) and type in “Controller Frankfurt” and a QUALITY list of appropriate jobs, likewise employers want to bring the target audience to their job adverts.
So from the above then this sounds fine and Yahoo is onto a winner and Google won’t be far behind.
However, if employers have their own career site (and many do) and behind that career site they have their applicant tracking systems et al then ideally they want to drive applications through that site. So the Yahoo model is “close but no cigar” in that what they really want to do is spider the corporates direct and cut-out the large job boards in between, and then the revenue model is simple for Yahoo – the same as their traditional – “pay for position”. Spidering a job board is easy, the data is in a consistent format and to get a large number of jobs is easy – for each country simply pick the top 3-4 job boards and bingo – a global database. Again, there is a problem with this – not all the jobs are there – a lot of well-known major corporates don’t need to advertise on job boards as the correct job-seekers know to come to their website direct.
Following on from this the market will split into two camps:
a) those who want to use yahoo, google etc to simply drive the traffic to their careers website and handle everything from there (try searching for jobs on google at the moment and it’s a poor response, so that’s why they need to follow the spidering model)
b) those who want a third party to do everything: drive the traffic, host their branded careers site, do the applicant tracking, etc
And there’s a reason why Google isn’t already there – spidering corporates direct is hard, we should know – it took us substantial resources to get to exactly this model in Germany and the UK. As to “job-boards are dead” - taking one of google’s earlier forays into the vertical market Froogle has not been a raging success and killed the other price comparison sites, so maybe the job boards will be around for some time yet.
July 7th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
No matter how you look at it, Yahoo! HotJobs just jumped into a position that makes them a serious player in this game. Already having come so far in a short period of time I expect big things out of this new launch from Yahoo! As a job seeker that actually utulized the job boards, I understand how “one stop shopping” makes complete sense. As for Monster and Career Builder, I am sure they wont be going any where for a while, but, it is clear from all this talk and opinion that they are shaking in their boots.
July 9th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
Dave -
I agree with you observations about Yahoo!’s jumping into the vertical job search engine space.
Thank for you sharing your thoughts!
Jeff Tokarz
CEO / President
Just-Posted
http://www.jobs.just-posted.com
July 12th, 2005 at 10:46 am
HotJobs’ Official Announcement
MercuryNews.com | 07/12/2005 | Yahoo to `copy’ jobs to beef up its listings Yahoo’s online job division, HotJobs, plans to announce today that it has taken the bold but controversial step of finding more job listings for its users by…