Jobs are Free! Oh, were you sleeping?
David and Eric led me to an extremely interesting presentation by Fred Wilson, Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures. The presentation is entitled “Does Information Want To Be Free?”, and after reviewing the presentation Eric smartly asks “Do Job Postings Want To Be Free?”.
Eric knows job postings are already free (DiversityJobs.com) and the employers who know, in most cases, are huddled around their hiring ROI reports and laughing at the rest of the recruiting world because they haven’t opened their eyes just yet. Shhhh, let them sleep…
Sorry, it’s wake-up time….
First off, is electronic information distribution easy? Yes.. Costly? No..
The days of manually posting jobs or buying a distribution package to several sites is over. Today, syndication is king and RSS or XML feeds make the manual processes seem like Orville and Wilbur’s flying machine. Just plugging these feeds into Job Search Engines, allows the job information to be distributed to thousands of sites, not just one. Moreover, hiring companies gain awareness for all of the jobs listed on their Corporate Career site, meaning you won’t have to anguish over whether you should or shouldn’t post jobs due to a limited job pack situation.
How do candidates apply?
Candidates finding these jobs will be pushed to the job description on your corporate ATS for application, building your resume database instead of stocking a vendor database to be resold, to you, next year at a higher price.
Who can manage these feeds?
JobCentral, a non-profit, manages XML job feeds for distribution around the world to over 1,000 sites, providing more candidate traffic, and job seeker applications than major job boards.
How can I leverage this technology to attract more candidates?
Indeed and SimplyHired are just two of the JobCentral sites, distributed to daily, that provide a PPC model to SUPERCHARGE targeted candidate traffic. Fred Wilson speaks about monetizing the “freemium” model and I believe these two companies are doing an awesome job. (hint, hint)
In Closing.
I’m just scratching the surface here, Fred’s presentation “Does Information Want To Be Free” smacks the online recruiting industry right in the kisser. Check out his wake-up call.
For all things recruiting, checkout ERE.
Comments(4)
You better believe it!
http://blog.hirestrategies.co.uk/erecruitment/2007/01/rss_the_death_o.html
I’ve been telling them this for years but the prices just keep going up and up and then along came the cliff, unannounced and out of the mist, and the lemmings just kept on going, oblivious of their fate until it was too late.
RIP – nobody will miss your rate cards…..
hmmm… talk about oversimplification! it only took me 10 seconds to find this on your website: “Post your job to JobCentral. ONLY $25 for 30 days!”.
everybody has to get paid somehow, so i don’t think free is quite the right word. and for the most part, i still see a marketplace where you get what you pay for.
Good point Eric, although the JobCentral posting piece was made availabe to afford small companies the ability to cost-effectively ($25/posting) utilize the power of online recruiting, our member companies do not view $400 postings as a viable small company solution. I am sure you already know that most Mom n Pops do not have an ATS, therefore JobCentral\\\’s job indexing technology is not available to them, thus the need for a legacy posting application. Check out Fred\’s presentation to better understand Freemium, and how companies will monetize the free flow of information.
Do Job Postings Want To Be Free? That’s a question we asked ourselves last year and decided to see. By taking advantage of RSS and XML and partnering with vertical job sites we have seen great traffic growth over the last few months. We have actually recently offered free resume search as well with 15,000 resumes in the database so far. It’s a simple solution for a lot of smaller companies and we hope to continue to build on our early success and keep the job postings free. Hopefully we can intergrate an ATS and Career Tools in the near future as well.