B2BSalesConnections.com, a job site that claims to focus exclusively on the sales, marketing and recruiting needs of business-to-business sales professionals, has launched in Canada with a high price tag attached to its postings.
Sales professionals can submit their resume to an email address, candidates@b2bsalesconnections.com, where a live screener will decide whether the candidate can enter into their database, which is not searchable directly on the site. If the applicant is chosen, a list of available postings will be sent to them.
On the employers side, the cost of postings is what peaked my attention. $495? For one job on a newly-launched site that has hardly any traffic and almost certainly less than 0 applicants? Seems a bit outrageous to me.
Here is just a quick comparison of the cost of a single, 30-day posting on other job boards compared to this one:
Monster: $385
CareerBuilder: $419
Yahoo! HotJobs: $349
Dice: $459
Craigslist: $25
Jobster: $99
JobCentral: $25
CollegeRecruiter: $175
AfterCollege: $325
SalesTrax.com: Free for basic posting
SalesAnimal: $199
SnagaJob: $169
So even some of the niche job boards don’t even come close to that figure. Of course I understand that all of these prices are negotiable, but it just got me to wondering, what is a job posting worth to you?
Popularity: 16% [?]
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I think that’s a great question Vanessa. To me (and our clients) there is no value in simply posting a job. Value is only created when a qualified candidate is identified…the posting is just a means to an end. Since the job posting has no guarantee of results however, it’s tough to swallow that pricing model. Although Internet technology is capable of administering a myriad of alternative pricing models which could tie value to pricing, the “pay to post” model was simply adopted from the newspaper model when job boards first started popping up in the early 90’s. It’s clear that employers/recruiters have thought about this model now and realize that “pay to post” places all the risk on them without any guarantee of results…which is why we are seeing this model being abandoned and replaced with the oldest model in the industry, pay for performance. The old timers call that pricing model contingency recruitment.
October 6th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Thank you very much for your feedback on B2B Sales Connections. Our research shows that not only is our pricing far less expensive then the three major Canadian job boards, more importantly we provide much more value to organizations and sales professionals in the business to business marketplace.
We are not just another crowded job board, filled with out of date resumes and MLM job postings. First, each job posting and each applicant are personally screened to ensure that they really are business to business sales related. Next, a series of specific questions are asked of each applicant and job posting company. Using our unique technology, this process actually matches what a sales organization has to offer with what a sales professional requires.
Based on numerous years of experience in the Canadian B2B marketplace, the result is that our detailed prescreening analysis connects the right employer to the right employee more quickly and less expensively than conventional recruiting methods.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
JobCentral provides 4 options, 2 of which are FREE:
http://www.jobcentral.com/postajob.asp
Most any company with a corporate career site can request a FREE nightly index by JobCentral’s search engine (pretty standard):
http://www.jobcentral.com/indexingrequest.asp
At the end of the day I still believe jobs want to be FREE:
http://thechad.jobcentral.com/index.php/2007/02/01/jobs-are-free-oh-were-you-sleeping
October 7th, 2008 at 9:02 am
OneClick (http://oneclick.jobtarget.com) has pricing for about 5,000 job boards….
October 9th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Good article Vanessa. Pricing in general is a science and not a simple exercise.
Two things are certain though:
1.You get what you pay for. Sites that are free now will eventually need to start charging in order to continue offering their service. Sites may offer free postings as promos. We sometimes do this to build up traffic on some of our sites, but once we’ve built up value, we’ll start charging.
Be careful when evaluating sites that offer free postings on a permanent basis. If it’s free, then that could indicate the value of what you’re getting.
2.Targeted reach is worth more than broad reach. Dice has the highest price tag on the above list of sites, higher than Monster and CareerBuilder. But they offer targeted access to professional engineers and IT people. This is worth a lot to those targeting this specific audience. Similarly, AfterCollege is on the higher end of the college space in terms of pricing. We offer targeting. A hospital looking for nurses can target nursing schools in our network. A tech company looking for programmers can target computer science schools in our network, and so on.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Roberto touches on the main point here: what is a free job actually giving you? I work for one of the sites listed above, and I can let you know that we aren’t really “job boards” anymore but simply advertising for businesses. That advertising, just like any other method (TV, newspaper) is priced based on impressions and unique visitors.
I like the concept of the pre-screened B2B site, but the inherent costs of doing that reliably and consistently with a live screener would be passed on to the employers. The price is a great deal for the service being offered…but how many applicants are coming in? Two or three? High cost for a very small amount of unique visitors.
Now the big argument is always…”We’re a niche site! We are targeted!” This is the method that small unrecognized sites use to say they’re specialized and that they can justify a price. Let’s use Dice for example…touted as the industry’s leader in IT Job Boards. Then you have Careerbuilder, who does everything. Careerbuilder, in fact, has about 170% more professional IT resumes/unique visitors on their site than Dice.
The point is that in most cases, we’re talking about employers looking to fill a position that’s a revenue generator (i.e. sales). In a year, who’s really gonna look back and care about the extra couple hundred bucks?
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:45 am
Andy you sound like a rookie who has never had his fingers dirty in this industry..
The problem is that we’re not talking about “an extra hundred bucks” here. Job boards went from $4,000 a year to $500,000 for some companies almost overnight. Nice diversionary tactic, but anyone who has been in this industry more than a day knows the “what’s an extra couple hundred bucks” line points out a true shyster.
Dice has been around longer than CareerBuilder and there is a reason. Companies use niche sites because they are more cost effective and they do not have to wade through all of the “IT-ish” crap in a huge CareerBuilder db or put up with the crazy amount of unqualified applications after posting a job.
As for Free? http://thechad.jobcentral.com/index.php/2007/02/01/jobs-are-free-oh-were-you-sleeping