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

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?

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.

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

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.