Ready for $2,000 job postings?
Classified Intelligence is reporting Tony Roy, managing director of CareerBuilder.co.uk, said he’d prefer $2,000 job postings when speaking at a recent conference. According to CI:
If he had his way, Roy said, each posting on a job board would be $2,000 or so. He pointed out that that recruitment agencies typically charge 18 to 30 percent of first-year compensation as their fee, and print ads often cost much more than $2,000 … there’s no reason online posting rats shouldn’t go up to $2,000 over time.
After some hot Q & A, Roy reminded the audience that online postings at one time were about $100, and now are in the $450 range. Does he have a good point? Fughedaboutit!
Aside from Monster recently backing down from a price increase, the times he’s referring to don’t compare to today. Google, APIs, open source software, social networking and the like didn’t exist to today’s degree when boards were dropping millions on Super Bowl ads. And if you think every client is paying top dollar at CareerBuilder and Monster, think again: I know of big companies who have negotiated pricing down to as low as $2-per-job.
And does he know about the predicament most newspapers are in? Classified cash is hardly rolling in like the ’90s, and it ain’t getting better. Inevitably, newspapers will become more competitive in the online space, potentially driving down costs even more. And agencies are a different beast altogether, but sites like Bounty Jobs are plugging in market forces to likely bring down pricing.
A lot more could be said, but in short, there’s more competition and fragmentation than ever before and it’s growing. Such forces cause a downward trend in pricing, not an increase. There will be a few niches that can get away with such premium pricing, but that will be the exception.
I think Homeboy Roy has had a few too many English ales.
December 1st, 2007 at 10:59 am
I know it may look crazy at first glance but think about it…with recruiting fees at the 18-30% range (many of whose candidates come from the job boards) and the 2K-10K employee referral programs, a 2K job posting doesn’t sound so outrageous; relatively, so long as the job board can ensure, as the recruiter (unless retained) and the employee referral do, that the advertisement results in a completed transaction. It would also account for a better user experience since I would imagine that the likelihood of bogus job adverts would be reduced dramatically. The apparent downside is that it would limit volume of traffic thus reducing the advertisement rates but I’m sure it’s nothing that a Harvard MBA can’t solve.
There is a business model here somewhere.
December 1st, 2007 at 11:25 am
Addition…my father once told me, and I made the mistake of telling my wife, that “cheap is expensive”. I’m constantly amazed at employers who consistently try to bargain down the costs of human capital when that asset to a company is it’s most valuable. Dr Gill Samuels, yes a woman, invented Viagra, not Pfizer. And although Pfizer may have provided the resources, those resources were not unique to Pfizer…it could have been any Pharma. How much has that hire benefited Pfizer? Money well spent. Point made.
Another lesson from my father, and yes, I didn’t learn that lesson by sharing it with my wife again, is that you never buy price, you buy value. Sure, monster had to back down on price and give big breaks to companies because their prices don’t necessarily justify the value. If it could, on a consistent basis, then the value would be there and monster or any other job board could justify charging a price much greater than then do now. Consider that a 100K job posting costs around $500 but a placement for that job through a 3rd party agency runs around $25,000. This isn’t fuzzy math. Again, a case study for some smart Harvard grads!
December 3rd, 2007 at 1:30 pm
When a job posting can interview a candidate, match to a job order, negotiate a compensation package, check references, and provide post placement consulting services then you can compare it to professional recruiting fees. Until then Tony needs to realize we ate talking apples and oranges, The job boards have been thinking for years that they can replace the staffing agencies (BTW the recruiting firms are some of the biggest customers for job boards) but the bottom line is that the staffing industry is generating $100B in annual revenue in the U.S. and $250B globally. The big 3 boards combine for only around $5B so they got a long long way to go.
Craig Silverman
HireAbility.com – The Recruiting Network
Join the Recruiting Social Network: http://www.hireability.com/sr
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Craig Silverman is the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for HireAbility.com, where he is responsible for building a new model for the staffing industry by banding together a global network of staffing agencies, independent recruiters and corporate recruiting groups to form a Social Recruiting Exchange Network. Prior to HireAbility.com Craig was the Senior Vice President for TMP/Hudson Global Resources (HHGP) where he was responsible for their $90M U.S. IT Services business. From 1996-2001, Craig was with Hall, Kinion and Associates (HAKI) as CMO & Executive Vice President, Recruiting Services. He was successful in growing the Hall Kinion recruiting business from annual revenues of $30M to $296M while opening 44 new sales offices, and hiring 400 recruiters.