With all the news swirling around Yahoo’s stake in HotJobs and an apparent desire to unload the company (smart money’s pointing to Monster being the buyer, by the way), we thought it would be a good time to catch-up with GM and vice president Chris Merritt for his take. We ran into him at SHRM last month and, in addition to rumors, we talked about the company’s launch of a pay-per-candidate model for employers and diving into the whole Twitter phenomenon.
“Pay-per-candidate is all about finding people who meet your screening criteria,” said Merritt. “Job seekers go through a questionairre, at which point they become a candidate and employers pay for that.” If an employer links to an applicant tracking system from their job posting, a job seeker jumping to that platform would then become a candidate.
Cost-wise, jobs are “plus-or-minus $400″ as a flat fee or start at $20-per-applicant if going through a screening questionnaire, $10 if jumping off to an ATS. There’s a minimum requirement of five applicants per posting. The company chose not to opt for a pay-per-click model for postings due to customer demand and feedback for not wanting too many unqualified applicants.
Merritt believes more employers, thanks to a toughened economy, are opting for fewer advertising options. The move to go pay-per-candidate helps alleviate some of the risk with choosing HotJobs over a competitor. “Let’s put the risk on HotJobs. We’ll drive the candidate flow. We’re confident in the users going to our site,” he said. Merritt also reiterated the flat fee option was still on the table and that, on the other end of the spectrum, HotJobs, and the industry as a whole, is a long way from a pay-per-hire model.
On Twitter, Merritt believes the platform has incredible potential in the employment category. “This is where our users have very clearly spoken and said, ‘We are using this technology,’ so we’ve come forward and said let’s apply the job searching process and integrate that with Twitter.”
Merritt credits much of Twitter’s effectiveness to real-time results. “In this market if you’re delayed in terms of getting the update on when the job opens, if you’re actively seeking, that’s bad.” With HotJobs, there are 100 different occupation and location categories. Seekers can choose the one that best fits their needs and get real-time updates within their criteria. At the time of this interview, the company didn’t seem to have a sound grasp on adding hashtags to postings – a common Twitter activity – but seem to have gotten the concept after doing a quick search.
Merritt mostly deflected questions about rumors of HotJobs being deleted from the Yahoo homepage navigation (it’s there now) and the rumors of acquisition. Additionally, there didn’t seem to be a clear initiative around mobile recruiting, although that could easily have been done for competitive reasons. However, if you read into that that maybe they’re expecting to be under new management soon, so why worry about that now, you wouldn’t be blamed for it.
The entire interview is roughly 20 mins. long:
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