Other than industry old timers and residents of its homebase in the Cleveland metropolitan area, few may know about a company called EmployOn. More may, however, know them by another name: Grass Is Greener.
Touting over 7 million job postings via their Web site, EmployOn/GIG has been spidering jobs back when the process was just a twinkle in the eye of Indeed, Jobster and SimplyHired. Sometime around 1998, I believe.
Although seemingly hibernating from the Internet recruiting landscape since, well, a long time, I think you may be hearing more about these trendsetters and their creation after learning about a recent acquisition of EmployOn by Get The Job.com.
Sporting a modest booth at this year’s SHRM conference, but enlisting the help of industry veterans like company head Chris Amato (Career Innovations’ BioSpace, HireHealth) and Bob Etheridge (Tech Expo, JobCircle, Boston Works) as their head of marketing, Get The Job is a job board with a daunting task: Make a dent in the Internet recruiting landscape on a national scale.
How on earth are they gonna do that?:
- First and foremost, they have a patent on the aggregation of online jobs (more on this later in the week). Won’t that make the vertical job search business a little more interesting? Think Friendster.
- Content from direct employers. No worries about Monster shutting off the faucet. (GTJ does seem to link to board if a corporate site provides their listings via a job site.)
- Pay-per-click advertising for job listings. Performance based advertising works for Google, but will enough employers jump on board in numbers large enough to support a business? Can consumer-based revenue generation be too far behind?
- Lean and mean. Adopting a PPC model keeps the cost of caring and feeding of sales and customer service pros down significantly.
- Google powered search. A bit misleading, as it’s not that difficult to plug in Google’s technology. However, thumbs-up to a job site for embracing the search giant so openly, even if it does their brand more good than Google’s.
- Job seekers are sent directly to corporate content (the look and feel of some employer sites is stripped away; all are embedded in a GTJ header). Job seekers, say goodbye to Monster’s spam machine.
- No time limit on how long a posting’s live. Even trade on an employer’s time between reposting a job and canceling a campaign?
Oh, and did I mention the fact that industry icon Peter Weddle is Chairman of the Board?
Sponsored listings are designated by an “Enhanced Results” label, which is required by the Feds. To date, the number of featured jobs is minuscule when compared to organic results, although I’m sure they’re planning on changing that sooner rather than later.
The site has some nice filtering features, helping job seekers to better target companies and locations. The standard tools, e-mail alerts and RSS, are easily available to users.
For anyone who remembers, GTJ may smell a little like Business.com’s now-deceased Work.com brand and business model from last year, but a closer look - particularly the patent (again, more on this later) - reveals some interesting weapons in the arsenal that may make the difference.
No doubt the Big Three of Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs sees them as David (if they even know about them, that is). But this David carries a very intriguing bag of rocks.
Keep an eye on these cats.
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