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Econ 101 - It’s Not The Job Ad, Stupid.
In line with the news about Yahoo crawling for free job postings, if you remember Econ 101, you will see that this movement in the market toward free listings and aggregated search engines (Indeed and SimplyHired) is evidence that the “job posting” itself is not really where the value is.
The posting itself is just words, and though it has been used as evidence of the dot-com industry’s legitimacy, and the saving grace (read: only consistent revenue stream) of newspapers all over the world
But in my opinion, the market is realizing that the value behind the ad is the people it connects–the recruiter and the candidate. If an ad will not adequately connect good candidates and the people willing to hire them, it is useless. To that end, since current job-posting technologies are doing little more than spamming recruiters with millions of resumes, the value is dropping rapidly.
Think quality contacts, not quantity of names, and you will begin to see why I am so interested in Jobster and HireVue as next-generation technologies growing out of the disconnectedness of the job-boards as they currently stand.
“Data is not information,” Clifford Stoll said, “any more than 50 tons of concrete is a skyscraper.” The same is true for job boards. Don’t give me names, the recruiters are shouting, give me results!
This explains why Jobazaar is serving hot, free ads for everbody–they the ads don’t have greater value than that. (Don’t get me wrong. Jobazaar is a good service, but there’s no marketability in a job ad for a price anymore. They’re collecting their revenue streams in other ways, I hope.)
This also explains why TheLadders uses a reverse model, allowing anyone to post and ad, and then it is filtered and presented to paying job-seekers. To further target their niche, they only accept positions $100K/year and up.
Can dollars be made with job boards? Of course, but I won’t be expecting such premiums in the near future. Craig’s List proves this so bluntly by offering free ads everywhere, but putting small price tags on premium locations where the sheer volume of ads posted would be too overwhelming. Again, Econ 101–the price goes up to slow down the supply as demand rises–now, I wonder, since eBay is running Craig’s List now, will we soon be bidding for job postings based on its relative market value and the relative supply/demand of the job?
I can see the commercial now:
Retweet This Post“C# Developer in Seattle–$50.00.
Systems Administrator in Boston to keep your data secure–$100.00.
Not going through 250 resumes each morning from your job postings–Priceless.”
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