Cheezhead

It’s certainly not hard to believe the vertical job search phenomenon is spreading throughout the world, although it’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.

I find one site, however, particularly intriguing. It’s Recruit.net and it’s focused on what is a pretty intimidating group of target markets: China, Japan, India, and Australia among others.

I recently connected with company head Maneck Mohan to get the skinny. (In the interest of full disclosure, the company is a client of HRSEO, but that doesn’t mean I think they’re any less cheezy.)

Q: So, give me your elevator pitch.

A: Recruit.net is a Hong Kong-based search engine for jobs. It is tri-lingual (English, Chinese & Japanese) and is focused on jobs in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Singapore and India.

Q: Aside from geographic target, what differentiates you from American vertical job search engines like Indeed?

A: With search engines in general and with verticals in particular the front end interfaces are invariably quite similar. It’s what goes on under the hood that are the key differentiators. This boils down to speed, relevancy and coverage. Our service covers six countries and supports complex search queries in Chinese, Japanese and English.

The job seekers resume is also an area we focus on. As a data source it provides great opportunity for more search personalization, targeted advertising and ultimately a better user experience.

Q: How do you plan on making money?

A: We make money via sponsored jobs which we sell on a CPM or CPC basis. We are looking into offering it on a CPA (per-action-basis) action being defined by when a resume is actually submitted or an application sent for a specific job. We also make money via our paid resume search service.

Q: How do you deal with the various languages and cultures? Is the strategy to creating a successful search engine the same in the US as it is in Asia and Australia?

A: Each country has their own nuances which we deal with, for example China has the largest number of duplicate job postings across the Internet so our de-duplication algorithm is entirely different for China. Australia is a very agency driven market which presents its own set of challenges. Japan is a very segmented market you have the Gaijin (foreigners) and the native Japanese and typically their online search behavior is very different.

Q: Do you have competition? Do you see signs of US-based verticals coming into the picture for your target markets? If so, what’s the plan on protecting your turf?

A: In India we compete with Yahoo! India and REDIFF a NASDAQ-listed Indian portal as they both recently launched job search engines. You can compare them to our Indian property http://india.recruit.net and come to your own conclusions but basically we welcome competition, it drives innovation and progress. Ultimately it comes down to who offers the best service.

The track record of U.S companies coming into Asia has been mixed. Consider Google’s experience in China and the fact that up until today their market share in China is still dropping, not increasing. Also remember that Yahoo basically sold out and handed their China operations to local player Alibaba. Sometimes partnering is a better option.

Q: Is Baidu better than Google? If so, why?

A: Baidu is far better for Chinese language searches and presents advertisers with a much better value proposition. In China there are numerous outlying cities where users have never heard of Google.

However, Baidu is known to be flippant in making the distinction between organic search results and paid results. For some popular searches the first three pages of results are all paid advertiser listings but they do not show up as sponsored results.

Q: What are some of your favorite employment-related blogs?

A: I really like The Asia Pacific Headhunter. Steven Kempton does a great job of propagating the HR Blogsphere across the Pacific Rim.

Q: Yeah, and he has a kung-fu dude on his blog. That’s way cool. Like, “Take this job, or I’ll karate-chop you in half.” OK, what new and exciting things can we expect from Recruit.net in the future?

A: We just announced a partnership with CSDN the largest Chinese-Speaking IT Professional community in China and expect to be making a few more similar announcements very shortly.

In terms of functionality we just launched a new auto suggest feature which gives users dynamic job search suggestions as they type. It supports both English and Chinese searches, It’s cool.

Super Bonus Q: In their primes, who wins a fight between Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee?

Q: Come on Joel, we all know Bruce kicked Chuck’s ass in the “Return of the Dragon.”

OK, fair enough, Bruce Lee was the baddest dude on the planet. No doubt. Thanks for the time, Maneck.

- No problem.

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