With the decline of printed publications accelerating daily, companies awash in the ink business have been tasked with taking their brand online and refurbishing traditional revenue models.
The Employment Guide, a weekly recruitment publication present in over 75 markets, has found a fresh audience with a bevy of online job boards. Job seekers can still grab an EG job guide from one of those familiar green stands at the grocery store, but EG’s parent company, Dominion Enterprises, is making sure the job guide doesn’t collapse like its counterparts.
EG’s EmploymentGuide.com, an online job board launched in 1995 that specializes in hourly and skilled jobs, boasts about 1.2 million visits a month, while their CareersinGear.com site geared towards OTR truck drivers has an average of 100,000 visitors per month.
Other sites include a job board for boomers, Wiseworker.com, and healthcare professionals, Healthcareerweb.com.
EG also hosts over 250 career fairs annually. A new pay-per-performance revenue model enacted by Jack Webber, EG’s Regional Manager of Sales, recently debuted last month in Houston, TX. Money exchanged hands only when job seekers handed in their resume at a vendors’ booth, with fees capped at $999.
Webber said the event was a success, with 50 vendors and 2000 candidates in attendance. A third-party vendor audited the attendance.
Joanne Perry, a coordinator for the City of Houston Public Works, said, “I liked the the turnout, the energy, and the candidates. There were plenty of vendors in attendance. This is one of the best recruiting events we 
have ever attended.”
Employment Guide’s Vice President and GM, Jeff Littlejohn, said they plan on testing the PFP model in several more markets during Q3.
“We are always exploring innovative ways of conducting business, and a pay-for-performance job fair is one such idea,” Littlejohn said. “I am particularly fond of the fact that these events put us in a position to satisfy our customer’s expectations while allowing us to fairly and effectively monetize them. While pricing models for these types of events will vary based on market size and event features, the simple premise is that our customers pay us for results.”
JobCircle.com, a regional job board that continues to host large-scale job fairs with traditional flat fee rates, has no plans to change their revenue model, which CEO Joe Stubblebine says is the most effective method of attracting vendors.
“We wouldn’t consider it,” he said. “Employment Guide is responding as such because their newspapers haven’t been doing well at all. People are just trying to take pay-per-click offline and convert it to the job fair model. Ultimately, if you put on good job fairs, and you get good qualified traffic, customers don’t have a problem paying the traditional fee because it still has value to them.”
Stubblevine added that they’ve had no decline in attendance, and vendor numbers climb into the triple digits at most of his fairs.
July 29th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
This will be interesting to watch!
July 31st, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Joel/Vanessa-
Thanks for the balanced tone of this post. One point of clarification though. The pay-per-performance idea implemented in Houston was the collaborative effort of a number of individuals. In particular, it’s important that recognition for that event be laid at the feet of Joe Rinaldi, our Houston General Sales Manager and his team. They developed and executed a flawless plan that resulted in a tremendous event. Also I feel it’s important for your readership to understand that we are not abandoning our traditional job fair model. As an organization we are focusing on innovative ways to drive and deliver results for our customers. We look at this event and this model in those terms. The recruitment landscape and expectations of our customers are changing rapidly. I believe we’d be foolish not to recognize that and try new things.
Jack Webber