In the past, a small time job site like Indeed.com most likely wouldn’t have stood a chance against big guys like Monster and CareerBuilder, getting bought up like FlipDog, Headhunter.net, and others.
But now smaller players are finding it a bit easier to breathe. An article in the NY Times called Online Searchers for Job Seekers explains.
Part of the reason is that the audience for smaller job sites is growing: consumers want to explore opportunities in an environment that’s less chaotic and overwhelming than the results the more generalized engines turn up.
The other reason is more business-focused and can be summed up in one word: Google. The AdSense network allows for a viable advertising model previously unavailable to these smaller competitors.
Traffic is still critical though, something these smaller sites will have to amp up if they want to survive. The good news is that the vertical is thriving. According to Charlene Li of Forrester, there was as much as a 35% jump in growth last year, compared to 8% from the year before. The bad news is that the Google and Yahoo are still holding all the cards – they still have the option of cutting out their referral traffic or starting up services of their own. No word on whether that will happen any time soon, but the overall effect has to be similar to the rat+snake-in-cage phenomenon
In the past, a small time job site like Indeed.com most likely wouldn’t have stood a chance against big guys like Monster and CareerBuilder, getting bought up like FlipDog, Headhunter.net, and others.
But now smaller players are finding it a bit easier to breathe. An article in the NY Times called Online Searchers for Job Seekers explains.
Part of the reason is that the audience for smaller job sites is growing: consumers want to explore opportunities in an environment that’s less chaotic and overwhelming than the results the more generalized engines turn up.
The other reason is more business-focused and can be summed up in one word: Google. The AdSense network allows for a viable advertising model previously unavailable to these smaller competitors.
Traffic is still critical though, something these smaller sites will have to amp up if they want to survive. The good news is that the vertical is thriving. According to Charlene Li of Forrester, there was as much as a 35% jump in growth last year, compared to 8% from the year before. The bad news is that Google and Yahoo are still holding all the cards – they still have the option of cutting out their referral traffic or starting up services of their own. No word on whether that will happen any time soon, but the overall effect has to be similar to the rat+snake-in-cage phenomenon
“the audience for smaller job sites is growing: consumers want to explore opportunities in an environment that’s less chaotic and overwhelming than the results the more generalized engines turn up.”
It’s tempting to equivocate on the word “small” just to craft a David v. Goliath story, but it distorts the truth. Indeed is a small company, yes, but its results pages are anything but small. Customers may indeed (no pun) want less chaos and volume, but if so, then Indeed and other aggregators will only frustrate them more than today’s big boards do.
i think there are 2 primary differentiators from what we (SimplyHired.com) are doing, and from what Monster and Google are doing.
Monster focuses on helping employers get greater visiblity for their jobs, and their economics are built around charging employers ~$300 per job listing. We’re happy to include Monster positions in our index and help send Monster more candidate traffic to fill their positions, however we also want to give jobseekers a broad view of *ALL* positions out there. Currently our search engine is indexing over 2.6M listings, many of which are from other job boards and classified sites like America’s Job Bank or Craigslist, and may have a zero-cost or low-cost listing fee structure. So fundamentally, we’re more about enabling the candidate to see a wide-angle view of the job market, but also enabling a zoom-in capability for candidates on specific oppportunities.
With regard to Google, we think they are primarily focused on building a broadly-used generic search and advertising platform, and they work with content partners and other niche-focused vertical search providers to monetize their traffic and provide distribution for their advertisers. It’s possible they might get into several specific verticals, but more likely they’d prefer selling traffic wholesale to downstream search companies, who in turn add value and sell traffic at retail to other advertisers. In other words, vertical search companies are channel for Google, and Google would like to provide relevance to searchers by connecting them with richer, more focused search results. They will probably do this directly for web search and for local search, however in other categories like shopping search, travel search, and job search they’re more likely to develop indirect channels than direct (although they may do both, like offering both Froogle and selling traffic to other shopping search engines).
So in both cases, we view Monster and Google as complementary partners, not really competitors. There may be a few areas of overlap, however we’re more likely to help send traffic and/or advertisers to each other in helpful fashion than to compete along all parts of that supply chain.
- Dave McClure
Director of Marketing
SimplyHired.com
One of the biggest challenges those of us in the Vertical Job Search market face is brand awareness and strength. You’d be hard pressed to find a job seeker who uses the internet and hasn’t used Monster.
Does that make Monster better? Not by any means. It’s the Microsoft vs. Apple vs. *nix debate – which is better? Is Microsoft the king of the hill because of their software quality, or is it something else?
The VJSE players must understand that to participate in the fight for market share – even niche market share – we must differentiate ourselves from the Monster’s, CareerBuilder’s, and all the other boards out there.
One way of doing that is by touting the content on our sites. We at Fetchster.com, a Minnesota Job Search Engine, feel that our method of gathering content is going to provide our users with the most unique set of job data for this state. How do we get our data? We crawl the employment portals of company websites.
And just how unique is it? Unique enough to have more Minnesota listings than CareerBuilder, Monster, or any of the major papers in the state. But we know it’s not complete, and I don’t think any of the other VJSE’s have a “complete” index either. Nonetheless, this market space is young and vibrant, and good things will happen. Ultimately, that will make for a better job searching experience for the end user.
Adam Gedde
Fetchster.com – http://www.fetchster.com/