Job distribution in Australia Citiwise/Statewise

Recruitment companies actively looking for talent from India.

Sameer

I don’t class subscriber mail list based products as ‘job boards’. They are fundamentally different (push not pull).

There are certainly not many of any significance. In order of market share it currently goes;
- Seek
- MyCareer
- Careerone (a distant third place)

JobNet used to be a good site for IT&T jobs, been around for a long time, but appears to have been acquired by JobServe. Their site is pretty slow, probably because it’s based in the Canary Islands! – nice place to run a job board from

There are numerous other ‘job boards’ but most are irrelevant compared with the Seek and MyCareer. Of the ones I can think of only Byron rate a mention, the others are just not getting any market share. There’s one called PositionsVacant who make big claims, but I did a search on there this morning under ‘Human Resources’ and with ‘human’ as a mandatory keyword. It returned 3 jobs nationally.

Most of the State Governments have wasted (our) money on their own sites, but they still advertise on Seek, MyCareer and/or CareerOne, so what was the point?

There are a couple of new ones. CareerSites have just launched, but despite their “niche” claim it’s not a great deal different to the two main players. After all you can search in different categories on Seek and MyCareer. CareerSites have just broken it down into separate sites and called it “niche”.

There’s also jobsjobsjobs.com who’s launch as been delayed from late Feb to late April, supposedly on advice from their media agency! Apparently we will “love” their media campaign (like we loved Axel?). Rumor has it they are spending $10M on their launch!

So these last two must have some big money behind them. CareerSites claim to have 60 staff and have three offices, which means their most basic overheads must be around $3M – $4M per year, and that’s without any promotion costs.

There are undoubtedly more on the way, but let’s hope we don’t end up like the UK where they have about 700 ‘job boards’ !

I don’t think “niche job boards” per se really provide any added value over Seek et al, unless they reach a different audience. What’s the difference between wading through 12,000 accounting jobs on Seek and 12,000 accounting jobs on some “niche” accounting job board ?

If a niche job board simply reaches a sub-set of Seek’s audience then why would you use it?
Only if the product is different and reaches a different audience will it be a compelling product for employers and recuiters.

But even if you have a genuinely different product, that reaches a different audience, it is incredibly difficult to get employers and recruiters to view you as anything but “just another job board”. A few get it straight away, but many don’t.

The job seeker advertising concept isn’t really new, it’s been around for years. I don’t think it has ever been very successful, because the top candidates don’t use it. They don’t need to. Many people also have some niggling concern that somehow their boss will work out that’s their CV!

As far as currency of candidate information is concerned, it may become out of date and relatively useless even quicker than a recruiters database, because it relies upon the individuals keeping their details up to date.

But even if it were a good resource, even if you could get everyone to keep their details up to date, I for one would still want to advertise and/or use a good recruiter, because that is the only way of knowing that I was seeing the best people in the market at that time.

At the end of the day, no single recruitment product will ever reach the whole market, period!

Couldn’t agree more with you about quality over quantity when it comes to ad responses. But hey, if you’re a recruiter and your boss says you have to send out 50 CVs per day you need a lot of CVs coming in, regardless of whether they are any good

I like http://www.parttimeonline.com.au a great idea with an even better niche!

I am also of the opinion that niche job boards will provide a cheaper and more viable alternative to employers who are getting lost in the thousands of jobs posted on SEEK. One area which also requires further exploring is the candidate advertising option. In our current employment landscape where skills shortages will become more pronounced, we should be offering the option for employers to find candidates listed on niche boards. The suggestion was made that it would be much easier for employers to search based on profiles and direct skill sets vs thousands of old and outdated resume databases. This would save employers thousands of dollars and make it a lot simpler for the job seeker to find what they want.

Finally I would like to comment on the employer perception that the more responses they receive to their advertisements, the more effective the job board must be. My view is that it is better to receive fewer, better qualified candidates. The measure should be how many high quality applications were received vs how many in total. This is where niche boards are more likely to add value.

http://www.parttimeonline.com.au is one such niche board that supports part time, job share and flexible employment across all industries and demographics. Advertising here almost guarantees that the people looking are focused in this type of employment.

have a look at http://www.glassfish.com.au – brand new – all open source,locally developed, and very Jobseeker focussed but also lots of nice Job search/match features..and lots more for recruiters.

Just need to find some marketing dollars etc! – appreciate your feedback, Nigel.

“They don’t want to go to multiple places to get jobs listings and then to sift through the duplicates.”

Many people don’t want to *go* anywhere to get jobs, they would prefer the jobs came to them, and as you said they understandably do not want to sift through duplicates, nor do they want to see irrelevant jobs.

These are precisely the requirements we set out to meet with our targeted employment advertising products. However, to achieve our goals we tightly control the content by inputting jobs manually into our content management system, we have firm rules about what sort of adverts we will accept, and we won’t allow the same advert to be repeated in consecutive weeks (unless there are material changes to the PD and/or salary package being offered).

I can’t see any other way to create a quality product for job seekers. This makes it a tedious business for us, and limits our revenue, but it results in a very high quality audience.

The problem for the PhDs at Googleplex, is that any automated, self service system, is open to abuse. The market is running hot so there is tremendous competition to reach the good candidates before your competitors, so any self service system WILL be abused. Some advertisers will repeatedly post the same jobs in multiple categories and locations, just as they do now with the traditional job boards. Indeed the traditional job boards encourage that behaviour, because it means more revenue.

I hear what you say about your frustration with the IT job boards, however they are presumably just traditional job boards primarily focussed on increasing advertising revenues in favour of providing a quality experience for the job seekers. Just be thankful you are not in the UK market – at the beginning of 2006 there were over 700 jobs boards in the UK. I don’t think anyone knows how many there are now!

Targeted advertising won’t reach a use by date, but too much targeted advertising will do. Let me explain. There are multiple jobs sites now setup for IT roles which are in addition to the big boys. Now if I want a job I have to register and monitor all of these sites just in case my dream job pops up in only a single location. This makes life difficult and reduces the user experience.

However I agree with you in that the current interface Google provides will not be the solution. But with all of those PHD’s floating round the Googleplex I’m sure they could find an answer.

I’d love to know why you think niche job boards and/or niche mail lists won’t work in the long run.

When will targeted advertising reach it’s “use by date” ?

I see niche products as the ideal solution – employers and recruiters advertising directly to the people they want to reach and no one else. The result for the advertiser is quality response rather than quantity (no chaff!).

The result for the potential job seekers – active or passive – is only jobs which they are likely to be interested in for no effort on their part.

Admittedly the niche products don’t carry ALL the opportunities that are out there, but the longer they exist the greater proportion of the available jobs they will have.

To attract the same audience as the niche job boards, Google would need to deliver a similar result but more comprehensive. Meaning they need to provide the audience with very easy and quick access to *only* the *latest* opportunities in their sector *and nothing else*. This is very difficult to do just with machines.

One of the biggest reasons are scope, big job boards have limited scope in that they are missing the niche boards. Niche boards won’t work in the long run either as they are just that niche. A search engine like Google will bring together this data, along with corporate recruitment sites. Making this truely easier for the job seeker and recruiter. I am just not sure when this will happen.

On an aside the recent growth in niche board popularity has been amazing I am truely amazed at the job boards being attached to many popular blogs in the effort to capture the passive job seeker. I wonder when they will reach their used by date.

If Google simply became an aggregator of Australian job boards that would just make it more time consuming for job seekers to find the information they require. There would be more ‘noise in the system’. Google would have to do something radically different.

The current ‘big job board’ model clearly isn’t working, at least not for many advertisers. This is why recruitment display advertising in print media has bounced back dramatically in recent years. Recruiters or their clients place an ad on Seek or MyCareer for $150, but increasingly they will also pay $5500 – $7000 to put the same ad in Saturday’s Age or SMH, (or some staggering amount of money for the Fin Review), and they will also pay a recruiter to explore other avenues.

They do this because they don’t expect to reach the people they really need via the big job boards. Yes they might get lucky with Seek so for $150 they will give it a go, but they know they will not reach passive candidates through Seek.

This is why there is a place for niche employment advertising products, particularly those with carefully managed content, because only quality content will attract and retain the attention of a quality audience.

Niche job boards are making a play but the biggest issue here is still consolidation, for the job seeker, but you don’t need to spend $200 to put you ad with the big boys. We already have the biggest baddest job board in town, Google. Now when they decide to move into jobs and advertise themselves as a place for candidates to find jobs we can watch Seek’s market share drop like a lead ballon. Not to mention what people are going to be able to do with Yahoo Pipes.

It is a virtually unbeatable position if you get it right first. Then the gorillas will have to buy you out. Good luck to RSVP and the You Tubes of this world, they got in on a niche and got out with loads of bucks. Then let the big guys lose the traffic as they muck around with trying to come up with a revenue model.

FYI, Fairfax could have bought seek for about $50 Mil back in 2003.