As far as I’m aware we’re the first of what I suspect will become a new breed - aggregate vacancies from evereywhere a la Indeed/Simply Hired, but then filter down to just those jobs relevant for a specific audience.

That way jobseekers get the best of all worlds - only look in one place, and no dross to wade through.

It will rely on the aggregation PPC business model solidifying is the only thing…

Any expert thoughts???

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting

Publishers and advertising agencies have a very difficult challenge ahead as traditional “horizontal” media like newspapers, TV channels and magazines see their traditional demographics and advertising revenue streams fragmented by the increasing preference of consumers for online access and the huge presence of Google eroding their audiences and potential future revenues.

Perhaps they should remember the words of Sun Tsu, who once said “When the enemy is too strong to attack directly, then attack something he holds dear. Know that in all things he cannot be superior. Somewhere there is a gap in the armour, a weakness that can be attacked instead.” Google’s major strength – the clean search box and the ease of use, commoditised ad revenues, perhaps masks its principal weakness. As media content and advertising revenues fragment to serve thousands and thousands of “vertical” online communities based on lifestyle or profession, Google may suddenly seem standardised, commoditised and lacking a sense of unique community. Is Google becoming Wal-Mart, while vertical communities may prefer Harrods?

Whilst “horizontal” media companies are similar to supermarkets, specialist professional “vertical” publishers are very specific in serving niche communities with totally relevant content and requirements. However, the publisher’s principal operating difficulty in becoming adaptive to this asymmetric Web 2.0 opportunity is that most tend to run each of their print, exhibition and online titles/businesses as separate profit and loss items on their balance sheet. As a by-product the vast majority tend not to have a centralised IT infrastructure or the human IT skill sets to manage a large scale data centre or web spidering facility – the prerequisites needed to datamine and aggregate open source, user generated and blog content to create vertical slices of the Web that are relevant for their audiences. Publishers will also need to integrate this content into the online extensions of their print brands and thereby allowing advertisers the opportunity to target high value communities. In addition, the datamining, crawling and hosting to identify relevant open source content will also need to be a continual process due to the continual growth of user generated and open source content.

Convera have two very large data centres, an extensive web spidering capability and a web index. Convera are now partnering with a significant number of specialist B2B publishers to create a range of vertical websites for specific professional communities. The first example of this is Searchmedica.com with UBM.

In building the deep vertical search portals, the key is to reach into the specific professional community in a number of ways. First, you can combined the trade publisher’s knowledge and contacts in the profession with community appeals that engage the specific audience in a way that general search cannot, and also by taking special care to use the taxonomies common to the targeted profession in organizing search results so that the user feels more at home and among peers. Building a good vertical engine can be costly and time consuming, and getting a critical mass of users to de-Google their search habits into more specialized engines is potentially a tough sell. However, in tests with focus groups from different professional communities to test these vertical search properties against Google, the results are hugely encouraging.

In building the beta test sites, the specialist publishers are providing Convera with “white lists” of data sources online and websites that would be most relevant to its readers so that the searches are restricted to reliable and trusted information. Publishers are also securing agreements with owners of key proprietary content not normally crawled by Google by leveraging some of its contacts and resources so that Convera can crawl and deliver some of their proprietary content. Another key consideration is getting the user community engaged in the process as co-developers. No matter how bad the results at Google or Yahoo may be for a given professional segment, the interface is familiar and the destination is always at hand. Getting users to think of a specialized brand as the go-to place for business information is the challenge.

A number of publishers are actively assessing the potential of adding social networking to the mix in order to get professionals interacting with each other and adding weekly podcasts by industry experts on issues affecting the community – these additional services will create more community loyalty and also additional advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

The publishers can also use their print titles to drive the audience to the new online areas and this will also assist the transition of their high value print ad revenues to online. Publishers also have exhibitions, seminars, events and email newsletters to assist this transition – and recent research suggests that professional communities will actively attend seminars and events to meet peers and other members of their community. The theory goes that once you get some professionals involved then the viral mechanism or behavioural “Hive Mind” also kicks in and professional workers start referring to the vertical portal as a community source. It is also allows advertisers and public relations organisations access to a clearly defined, affluent, influential and stable audience.

Google does not allow you to have a beer with a potential business partner - it doesn’t have that sense of community. But Google is fighting back – the recent launch of Google Custom Search and acquisition of teenage social network sites indicates they are aware of their weakness – but specialist publishers see this as a Trojan Horse. Social networks for teenagers are highly transient and target a demographic that is volatile, unpredictable and has a low level of disposable income – whereas a social network alongside a vertical search service for 22,000 bio-chemists, 55,000 UK GP’s, 55,000 insurance risk assessors or 120,000 US psychiatrists is stable, affluent and attractive for advertisers.

And thanks to Joe, for giving our GOJobs.com website a great recommendation!

Vertical search is great for job seekers. (Indeed had approximately 4 million uniques in January.)

Vertical Search and their PPC models are also great for ALL employers and job boards!

The problem is that the only people who get it, are the guys/gals in the industry.
Indeed and SimplyHired don’t have the resources to educate directors of Recruiting, which is required to get the employers involved.

Job board owners get it…
The Cost of Acquiring a job seeker, with Indeed, SimplyHired, TopUSAJobs, etc is dropping consistently. We have seen the cost of acquiring a candidate down as low as $.60 per resume.

Most employers are paying the big boards about $5-$11+ per resume/applicant. (Average cost per job posting/ number of “resumes” entered in to the database… not “click-thrus”)

For example, say you purchase a job posting on one of the big job boards, at a cost of $400 (for example purposes only, since bulk rates drop the prices significantly), and say you get 40 Applicants (again, an applicant being 20 emails, or 20 resumes in your resume database. This is not 20 click-thrus from the job board to your site, because not everyone who shows up on your website fills in a application).

The result is $400/40= $10 per applicant.
You can massage the numbers to fit your average cost per job posting and your own average response rate, but the actual cost per candidate will still probably come out higher than what you can do with a Vertical Search Engines PPC model, as per below…

Say you sign up with Indeed. You bid $.50 per click through for all of your jobs. (Which you do not have to, because you can bid individually, for some harder to fill positions, etc.) Then, you get 100 clicks from Indeed. Those clicks cost $50 ($.50*100). Of those clicks, say 10% convert to applicants, this means only 10 resumes, from 100 visitors to your site.
The cost per resume is $50/10=$5.00 per applicant, 50% of what the big board charged you.

Indeed charges you $5.00 per resume, and a big board charges $10…
It’s easy to see where the market will go…

There are problems though.
1. You only got 5 resumes… that’s not enough to realistically fill a position with, in most cases.
2. There is a lot of learning and technology required to get this opportunity to work. Fortunately, a lot of this can be handled directly through the vertical, or through someone who can manage the campaigns for you… think ad agency who gets it…
3. The big boards are easy to use. They are Branded, and they know how to sell… Verticals, PPC, SEM, etc, aren’t any of the above.

I guess the success in the Verticals will be derived from the how quickly the market understands the above, is willing to go out on a limb, and how quickly supporting services can help educate and manage these PPC platforms…

I’m through my hat in on the later… a great opportunity for anyone who can execute.