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I never imagined myself disagreeing with Peter Weddle, an icon in our industry, but I find myself at odds with his most recent article entitled, "The Next Big Thing in Online Recruiting."
In short, Weddle claims that job search engines and portals – Indeed, SimplyHired, Google Base, etc. – are only effective in attracting active, less appealing candidates.
Weddle says of job search engines, "Their value proposition for candidates is
simple: We make it easy to find employers’ job postings. Sure, that
increases candidate flow—assuming the search engine site or portal is
well known to workers, which is not always a safe assumption—but that
flow comes only from those who are actively looking for
a new job. To put it baldly, search engines and search portals attract
and support active job seekers."
Granted, I won’t argue that search engines are a tremendously positive resource for active job seekers. However, I think it’s incredibly short sighted to stereotype them as havens for these inferior candidates.
Consider the following:
- Vertical search engines are providing superior tools for passive job seekers to obtain content. Indeed has integrated its job search into everything from Google Talk to Google Desktop to easy-to-understand and access RSS feeds. All of which make it convenient for the best and brightest to keep effortless tabs on new opportunities. Even to the point that traditional email alerts seem archaic and cumbersome.
- Search engines can be as big or as small as necessary. A candidate who visits a job site can generally apply to a multitude of jobs shotgun-style for which they may or may not actually qualify. A nightmare for employers. With Google, however, a company like Macy’s may decide to only target those who are searching targeted terms like "retail management jobs" or "cosmetics jobs." With pay-per-click advertising, they can even focus those searching in a specific market. But isn’t this still an active job seeker? Well, maybe. It’s much harder to shotgun specific keyphrases in Google than it is your job board of choice. Plus, what’s to say the person searching "retail management jobs" isn’t a qualified retail manager based on this search? Maybe they are genuinely just looking for a new retail management opportunity.
- How ’bout non-job-related keyphrases? Consider telecommunications. Imagine the latest technologies, characters, companies, periodicals, news, books and associations surrounding this profession. Users searching such terms aren’t actively looking for jobs necessarily, but they may be great candidates to be in front of.
- Google is creating the infrastructure to target passive candidates like never before. It’s Google’s world. We’re all just visiting. Remember the movie Minorty Report, starring Tom Cruise? Remember how people would be walking around and have ads displayed to them based on their eyeball make-up? With Google getting its fingers into everything from WiFi, VoIP, GPS, auto makers, radio, video, payments, etc., they’ll be able to know more personalized information about you than any job site could ever dream. I’ve elaborated on this before, but believe me when I say it’s going to be awesome, baby!
Weddle’s ideal solution centers on job communities like TalentZoo (by the way, I bet the majority of TalentZoo’s unique traffic comes via search engines), of which I don’t disagree. I have a client who is a niche job site whose forum gets more traffic these days then the job search pages. That’s significant.
Of these sites, Weddle says, "They provide job postings for the active
job seeker and career advancement information, content and
functionality for the passive person. Equally as important, they
facilitate personal development and support peer-to-peer interaction
and collegiality, regardless of one’s employment situation."
So, OK, hooray for job communities. Just don’t sell search engines and the power of Google short.
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Blog sponsored by Battling Free.
Popularity: 1% [?]
February 7th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
you know, we used to hear the same sort of stuff when i worked at PayPal — about how all the part-time sellers & work-at-home Moms who were using PayPal to accept credit cards were much less valuable than bigger, more reputable merchants… at least that was what the major card associations & analysts used to say.
but a few years later, Paypal was generating billions (with a ‘B’) of dollars in payment volume from all those “small-time” sellers, and turns out Visa and MasterCard (and Wells Fargo in particular) were more than happy to help PayPal handle the payment volume… assuming PayPal dealt with all the customer service issues and fraud risk.
now that old familiar refrain i hear Mr. Weddle saying is “the front end of the long tail is where all the value is… don’t waste time with the looooong end”.
however, the lesson the Internet (and Chris Anderson) keeps teaching everyone is quite to the contrary: if you’re willing to do the work, the value in the long end of the long tail is just as significant as the front end — and in some cases, a lot more so.
examples:
– Amazon (for out-of-print & small-run books)
– Netflix (ditto for videos)
– PayPal (for part-time sellers)
– Google (for small advertisers)
in any case, there’s nothing wrong with providing tools for “active job seekers”… they may not be your VP-level candidates, but neither are they trailer trash. and giving people simpler, better tools to see all the opportunities available to them can’t be a bad thing.
in summary i say: “give us your tired, your poor, your active job seekers yearning to search free… “. we’ll be happy to help them out with finding a new job :)
- dave mcclure
http://www.SimplyHired.com
February 8th, 2006 at 6:30 am
I’d support Dave. Not everyone wants to be a superstar; just go to work, serve, take the cash, go play! And they are in the majority so lets help them do what they do, and if these makes them an active, transient job seeker, then so be it.
February 8th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Joel-
First, my thanks to you … on two counts.
1. Thanks for taking the time to read my column.
2. And thanks for offering a counterpoint that was both civil and rational. The U.S. Congress should take note.
Second, I’d like to offer a couple of points to clarify what I wrote.
Search engines have as much opportunity to create community and attract passive prospects as do traditional employment sites; the problem is that they haven’t. Nor, however, have many Web-sites. And there’s the rub; all are effectively ignoring a significant segment of the population–if you believe the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate that active job seekers comprise just 16% of the workforce at any point in time. I agree that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with helping employers connect with active job seekers; successful sourcing, however, requires that you reach more of the population.
As to the use of search engines by passive prospects, you can lead a horse to water, but …. I speak frequently to groups of active and passive job seekers; the former are motivated to do whatever they can to connect with employment opportunities. The latter are almost always too engaged in their current job and in the rest of their life to bother with what’s going on in the job market. Indeed, many feel as if they are being disloyal to do so. Until that dynamic changes (and it can with better on-site content, features and functionality), I think search engine penetration of the passive population will be minimal.
Peter Weddle
WEDDLE’s
February 8th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Great conversation guys! It seems rare these days to find blog posts where the comments add as much value as the original post. Hats off to each of you for sharing your perspective!
Bob :-)