In light of a recent price increase from 20 to 25 cents per click, compliments of Simply Hired, a job board owner, who will go unnamed, vented his displeasure to me with what he referred to as an “unnecessary middleman.”
They are doing nothing but driving up our job seeker acquisition costs and cluttering the space more than it already is. I end up competing with myself. I have to spend money marketing my own site’s jobs, then I have to give them money to promote those same jobs, while they also drive up my overall marketing costs competing with me on Google’s pay-per-click platform.
Eventually, they’ll want $1 or more per-click for the same set of eyeballs that I used to own for a fraction of that cost. The niche sites are helping build a business that may one day price them out of the market, or at the very least make their lives a lot more difficult. Plus, is it really better for the job seeker? They end up seeing the same job postings from multiple job boards because these guys are doing business with all of us. It’s a waste of the candidate’s time.
I think he speaks for a lot of niche sites who are growing more and more skeptical of the vertical job search engines. What was once a warm and fuzzy way to get some extra traffic is becoming a growing headache to the bottom line. What’s probably more frustrating is many niche sites believe, at this point, they have to advertise on them. Otherwise, the competition has the upperhand. Unless some major movement occurs to take content off the verticals, a la Craigslist, things aren’t likely to change.
Indeed and Simply Hired have created an interesting dynamic with many of the job boards they serve and generate most of their revenue. It’s unclear if they foreshadowed such a scenario when they started. Regardless, they seem to have a lot of job sites by the balls: Leave us and you’ll lose out on the traffic; stay and we’ll continue to empty your wallet.
Google retains a similar relationship with many of its advertisers. It’s a love-hate that’s not going away anytime soon. My contact expressed his hope that the verticals would dry-up and die from their VC funds running out, considering the current uneasiness of the economy.
I’m afraid it’ll take more than that at this point. Vertical job search engines may already be a cost of doing business for most, if not all, job sites. Worse news for my friend is new verticals and innovations are bound to come along. But, hey, competition is good for business, right?
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August 23rd, 2007 at 2:46 pm
There is another option: don’t pay more per click that your ROI metrics permit. Get creative and generate traffic in another way, perhaps by using that money or a portion of that money. Generate original, desirable content for your site and see your natural search traffic soar. Crosspost your jobs with other boards so that you both take advantage of the rising tide. Are you helping your competitor by doing so? Sure, but they helping you too.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Excellent topic. JobCircle.com distributes its’ jobs to a plethora of third party sites, vertical sites, niche sites, regional sites, executive sites, aggregators, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes, when I do a search on one of these sites, I laugh, because I’ll see our client’s job showing up 6 times in a row, all from different sources! Sometimes we’re paying per applicant, some clicks are free, sometimes we’re paying per resume. Some sites that are attached to big social networking sites do lousy, and some small organic sites that have nothing going on drive tons of traffic. It is all so interesting. On one of the two major verticals, we found that we get better results when we just use organic search verses doing both organic AND sponsored search. Go figure. Now, you’ve got models that deliver clicks, applicants, resumes – which is the best? What about Gadball? Push out resumes for a $1 – do this for 40 job boards, and now you’ve got a $40 resume every time someone submits to your site. What is an acceptable cost-per-click/resume/applicant threshold? How does one constantly log and track this data so that a job board operator can even ascertain whether they are getting good ROI on their CP* expenditure? As Google adwords bidding warfare continues to push the pricing higher for the same amount of traffic, and the amount of companies jumping on the CPC bandwagon continues to increase, what used to seem like a great secret weapon to generate clicks, applicants, and resumes now becomes a $25K a month expenditure.
Hmm…maybe it’s time to do a postcard mailing?
August 25th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Interesting Topic.
Another angel on the topic is this…
In the last 12 months niche job boards have seen tremendous growth, in terms of revenue, visibility, and client acquisition.
Ask any major employer… they are using niche job boards more now, than ever.
Look at the success of Jobing.
What about JobTarget, Boxwood, and SearchEase, who between the 3 of them probably host over 3,000 niche job boards. These job board hosting platforms are getting more job boards clients, who are making more and more money…
I’m betting that verticals, including Indeed and SimplyHired have a lot to do with this success.
Prior to the recent successes of Indeed and SimplyHired, most niche job boards have had terrible job seeker response rates. As a result, employers would try them once and move on.
With low cost marketing through Vertical Search engines the average response rates from the niche job boards is going up.
It’s not surprising the FREE or cheap marketing that works, isn’t going to be FREE forever.
In the future, vertical search engines will be dominated by employers who will drive the cost up.
At the moment, the majority of paying clients on the verticals are job boards.
Verticals are selling a game of marketing arbitrage, buying job seeker traffic for cheap and resell that “traffic’ as job seeker applicants, for a major profit. The job boards are simply living off the inefficiences in the market.
Employers, generally, have limited vertical product knowledge Internet Marketing including PPC, SEM, or SEO.
Once the employers realize they can go direct to the source, instead of through a middleman (any job board), we will see a big change in the market.
Employers will realize the the above, and the cost for PPC will increase…
Who knows… staffing firms and major employers might even realize that Search Engine Optimization is the BEST long-term marketing ROI anyways.
August 27th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Having read some of the posts above is it true that simplyhired and indeed are asking people for money to host their jobs? I have been running a vertical job search engine for 4 years and never charged anyone to put jobs on it. If spam became a problem I would, but so far I have not needed to do it.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Simply Hired provide bloggers and other online publishers with a tool to host jobs on their sites. So in essence the publisher, who dictates the price on the postings, has to give a cut to Simply Hired, much like you have to pay eBay for hosting your auction.
It is definitely not a solution for staffing firms who have their own websites set up for posting jobs and as Jonathan Duarte pointed out above, SEO is a more sensible solution, not Simply Hired (unless those staffing firms/employers are looking to reach the audience of a specific publisher).