One of the big players in the US that seems to have identified the way the employment market is trending is jobfox. They are focusing more on the passive jobseeker as a long term strategy.

Established sites like http://www.linkme.com.au and new sites like http://www.reversejobs.com, and emerging sites like http://www.jobjett.com I feel will gain inspiration from sites like this and focus more attention on the passive jobseeker.

Kevin’s comment is interesting I think, it would be good if there was a policy of no duplicates job ads on a site, if that was possible.

http://www.linkme.com.au is looking into how to best handle this ourselves, we are quitely looking at how to provide a good job posting and reading solution for the job hunters out there.

Some recruiters try to ’spam’ job seekers with their adverts for exactly the same reason that spammers send us email about whatever, because they’re playing a numbers game. They purposely place their ads in incorrect categories effectively misrepresenting the position, and/or repeatedly post the same ad.

Job boards, in Australia at least are relatively cheap and the agencies pay far less than the job boards published ‘job pack’ rates. This makes ad spamming affordable.

Job mail subscribers soon get fed up with non relevant and repeat job ads and either unsubscribe or just don’t bother reading the job mails anymore.

Job board pricing could be the solution in an automated world. An example is Monster UK, they have less than half the number of job ads carried by Seek in Australia, yet the UK’s population is three times Australia’s and they too have low unemployment. Why is this ? I suspect because Monster is 3-4 times the price of Seek – pricing the ad spammers out of the market.

It’s just possible that everybody wins with the Monster model. Job seekers have to search through less rubbish, advertisers get a better response and Monster makes more money!

Very interesting.

“Should job boards reach these people (passive job seekers)? Or should they stay focused on the active candidate? I know this is a bit of a polarised view but there are lots of perspectives on this but I just want to see every-one’s thoughts.”

I’m of the view that everyone is open to hearing about interesting job opportunities, the issue is how much effort people are prepared to put into it. The active job seeker will search job boards, newspapers and solicit agencies. The passive job seeker generally will not. Job boards should absolutely go after the passive candidate; the hard part is how to do it. At Recruit.net we encourage users to sign up for job alerts the process just takes seconds, and allows passive job seekers to track potential areas of interest for example a PR Manager in Brisbane may want to track PR Director openings in Brisbane looking for that move up the corporate ladder.

I think the job ads in the general news section of newspapers is very interesting, editors just need to get the right mix so as not to put off their readers and remain targeted. Even if you run Finance ads in the finance section the field is so broad, (hedge funds, fixed income, commercial banking, derivatives, loan processing etc. etc.)

In the future the best way to reach passive job seekers is to serve contextually relevant jobs on niche sites and blogs. Job Aggregators and large job boards can distribute highly targeted job feeds on highly relevant web sites. There is a lot of room for innovation ahead…

Couldn’t agree with you more about recruiters needing to have a range of different recruitment advertising strategies. It’s naive for anyone to think that any one solution will be a panacea.
I used to run an agency and it was that very thing that got us into job boards in the first place. We quickly realised that if we were going to compete effectively we needed to find ways to source different candidates to our competitors rather than just dredging up the same people each week on Seek.

Job boards proved to be a very effective competitive edge for us. So much so that we closed the recruitment business down to focus exclusively on job boards.

I also totally agree that there will always be a need for recruiters. In the same way that there will always be a need for high quality, value adding niche employment sites. I don’t think we have even started to scratch the surface yet.

We have a typical scenario explained on one of our sites see http://www.jobsinhr.com.au/info/why/

The truth is, no single recruitment advertising product will ever reach the whole market. The key to success in recruitment advertising is to use different products, which reach different people!

Timing is another issue – is the person you are wanting to attract, browsing Seek in the window of time when your ad is displayed in the first 1-2 pages of search results? Because if they’re not, they probably won’t ever know your job exists.

To some extent the job boards are a victim of their own success, or the advertisers are untill they realise what’s going on. There comes a point where a job board gets so big it’s value for the advertiser starts to diminish.

This is why there will always be a place for recruitment companies, because for them recruitment is a full time job and the good ones explore every avenue possible to find the people their clients need. This includes re-advertising jobs again and again!

A couple of interesting questions. Should job boards reach these people? Or should they stay focused on the active candidate? I know this is a bit of a polarised view but there are lots of perspectives on this but I just want to see every-one’s thoughts.

Although the newspapers have lost market share in classifieds, they are enjoying an increase in display ads in the early general news section (Age and SMH) plus Friday’s Fin Review, for which they can and do charge a premium.

Why is this happening? Because the job boards don’t reach many senior people and certainly don’t reach passive job seekers – those people who are employed and are not desperately seeking another job, but might make a move if something tempting is presented to them. This is why the newspaper’s predicted demise was premature – because newspapers reach people who aren’t necessarily looking for a job.

Yes I tend to agree that just using the 3 gorillas is a flawed approach. However like Alexa I guess it does give an overall indication of trends.
I don’t think there is any doubt at all that more and more jobs are coming online.
I am not necessarily convinced that it means we have a booming job market (although clearly we do in some sectors), but I am absolutely certain that it shows more companies are now advertising online as well as or instead of traditional forums.

Pretty hard to see that trend going changing either.

Cheers
Brett

You are right it depends what you want to measure. I suspect because of the length of time the Olivier Group has been doing their survey it would be very difficult to add new properties, upset the index.

But it is still no good to take the pulse only to realise a day later that the patient had brain cancer and dies.

Wabi Sabi – discussions on HR and technology. The latest online job ad figures were released yesterday and they have increased again for the 8th month in a row….

either way you cut it, it appears tricky to derive a sample representative of the health of the online ads environment.

on one side, verticals are aggregators that may just be an echo chamber (where did i hear that?) for what’s happening with the boards or recruiter jobsites;

similarly, to sample the three main players may also present a similar risk as I would speculate that a significant percentage of their ads are the same ones posted by the same advertisers.

conversely, to select niche sites such as brett’s properties might also indicate the health of such niche as opposed to the ‘general’ market; so how big does the sample need to be for the niches’ representation to be statistically relevant…

it might just have to come down to what you want to measure. If you just want to take the pulse of a patient, you just need to put your hand around the wrist, not commence invasive surgery