Being in the online recruitment industry as long as I have, I should have been more skeptical about job postings on blogs being a great idea and huge success. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great idea. But since when did common sense equate to dollars and cents with HR? Selling job postings is a bitch, best left to professionals.
With the exception of sites like Crunchboard and a few other tech-heavy blogs, there are few examples of success. To the best of my knowledge, those blogs have some sort of dedicated staff pushing postings, which is a luxury few others can afford.
Cheezhead is a perfect example. I write for an audience largely representative of the recruiting industry, and as of this writing I have zero job postings on my blog. Zero!
I get good traffic and what I believe is a great audience (hey, you’re reading, so it’s gotta be good, right?), of which 5-7 percent are checking out the jobs page. I even lowered the price to $5/30 days to get some content. Slam dunk, right? Not so much. Total failure. I suck.
And I’m not alone. Much better, A-list bloggers like Guy Kawasaki and Andy Beal have struggled, and I believe will continue to struggle without dedicated resources. B- and C-list bloggers are pretty much wasting their time under the current model, which probably means the model should change.
What could a new blogs with jobs model look like? A few ideas:
- Let the provider sell the jobs. For example, Simply Hired, who runs Job-a-matic, could dedicate resources to selling job postings on blogs in their network. They could even create channels to sell, such as tech blogs or new media or whatever.
- PPC to the rescue. When feasible, the solutions provider could simply plug-in spidered job content and showcase their own PPC listings, sharing the revenue. Bloggers would then only have to worry about driving traffic to their job section.
- Sponsorship. Many bloggers have real estate that’s valuable enough for a job board or content provider to simply slap on their logo, provide the jobs and pay the blogger a fee for renting the space.
- Agencies. What if recruitment ad agencies sold blogs as they did job boards, taking a percentage of the sale?
Blogs are superb mediums by which employers can get in front of passive, targeted eyeballs at a relatively low cost. Now we just have to convince the employers.
Popularity: 18% [?]
March 29th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Excellent post Joel!
The ‘jobs for blogs’ business model doesn’t appear to pass the ROI threshold expected by employers … you may only be charging $5, and the quality of your readers is beyond question, but the cost to the employer also includes the staff time to make the post.
Let’s say that the employer assumes that it will take 15 minutes to post the ad (it may only takes 2 minutes, but perception is king), and the fully loaded cost of person posting the ad is $40 per hour … so we add another $10 to the cost.
Still seems ridiculously cheap, but then there is the opportunity cost … how might that 15 minutes be used more productively? And how many 15-minute blocks of time are ‘free’ during the average work day? Perhaps a post on SHRM’s HR Jobs site, a Weddle’s 2007 user’s choice winner, would cost a little more but deliver a lower cost per qualified lead?
Hard to say … but surely Monster proves the point that purchase price is not the primary criteria in employment advertising.
March 29th, 2007 at 10:11 am
It sure is difficult to sell the ads, especially as I’m not dedicating enough promotion to the job board. I’m actually considering making them free, and simply using it as a value add for readers.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I don’t get HR professionals. They constantly complain that they can’t attract the passive job seeker, yet blogs are supposed to be a great opportunity to attract the passive job seeker. Cheezhead is one of the blogs that gets damn good traffic. Just look at the alexa traffic rankings.
Whether you charge $40 for a job posting or $5, it is still a lot cheaper that what the traditional job boards charge. If people want to continue to overpay for a job posting, then go right ahead. This is why hr professionals can’t get a seat at the strategic planning table. It is their inability to change. To see value when they see it.
March 29th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
There is a lot of truth in what Nick says.
My advice would be to sell only a “featured” job every 30 days and put that job on the homepage. You could guarantee the employer 30 days of exclusivity while maximizing the exposure for that job. You could sell it for hundreds $$$. 1 job a month at a higher price would bring in more revenue that several at $5 apiece.
March 29th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Joel,
We had this very thought in mind when we developed the Indeed Jobroll – a continually updating feed of sponsored job links that you can put on any blog or website and get paid. *No need to sell job postings, no need to deal with clients.*
You get paid every time your users click on the jobs in your Jobroll. You can customize your Jobroll so it only displays jobs suited to your audience. The jobs are even geo-targeted to your users according to their IP address.
It’s easy – give it a try? You can set up a publisher account here to get started:
https://ads.indeed.com/jobroll/
Paul
CEO, Indeed
March 29th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Marketingfacts.nl a dutch marketing weblog is posting paid jobs ads as regular posts on the homepage. This seems to be working but for a lot of readers this content isn’t interesting at all.
http://www.marketingfacts.nl/jobs/
March 30th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Micro Job-Boards aren’t going to replace big job boards entirely. People need to find a niche, not just another wall to scribble on.
March 30th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
I tried Job-A-Matic on my Restaurant Recruiters blog, but it couldn’t serve up jobs even loosely related to something that my audience would be looking for.
I don’t go to Monster and look for healthcare jobs because I’m not interested in healthcare employment… my readers aren’t likely to be interested in much beyond the restaurant industry. Those are just the facts. You can read more of my opinion at: http://www.recruiting-usa.com/2007/03/30/blogs-with-jobs-an-idea-destined-to-fail/ although, the title of the artcile jsut might give it away.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:18 am
I don’t think the idea is destined to fail, just that you have to look at it realistically.
Take this Cheezehead Blog as an example. Cheezhead has an audience of mostly-employed recruiter-types. For us, a recruiting job blog isn’t our first priority. There will be a small percentage of us who are looking (passively at first), but how do you get the jobs in front of us?
I’m still struggling with this, too, but if your traffic is anything like mine (percentage-wise, obviously, not number-wise), more than half of your visitors / hits are going directly to the blog (probably with a reader) and usually don’t get to the rest of the site.
So, either you have to constantly plug the jobs section in the main blog or you have to actually put the listings themselves in the main blog. That way, the folks who are potentially interested in a new job get regular updates and those of us who aren’t skip that blog posting.
Of course, then the problem (more for a high-readership blog like yours than an X-Lister like myself) becomes that you can’t have a ton of listings.
It’s a fine line and we’re still working out how to make it happen. I think it’s a little early to call it DOA.
Dan