Google & Yahoo! vs Job Boards
Today I’m attempting to transition from across the pond, Job Board Penetration in Europe, and tackle the same issue here in the United States, market penetration for talent.
In March 2007, Google Sites captured 48.3 percent of the U.S. search market, while Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 27.5 percent of U.S. searches. – comScore
Touting U.S. penetration of 48% and 27%, Google and Yahoo lead the U.S. search market and provide an extremely flexible and cost effective avenue of approach for active and passive recruitment strategies.
More search category intelligence from comScore:
1) Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in March.
2) Google Sites led the pack with 3.5 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites at 2 billion.
Now lets turn our focus to the “#1 job board” in the U.S., which represents a much smaller 13% of the “job board category“, an extremely small fraction compared to the numbers displayed by Google and Yahoo! who play in the much larger “search category” sandbox.
Regardless which side of the pond you’re recruiting on, SEM with Google or Yahoo! will provide your company better market penetration and an innovative advantage over your competitors engaging top talent globally.
Comments(6)
C,
What happens when the entire Fortune 2k decides to take what you say to heard and saturates \”search directories\”? Clearly G and Y become the big winners with giant cash windfalls but of what real benefit in talent acquisition will there be since they are all scrambling to take your (and everyone else\’s in the SEO/HR world\’s) advice? Or by that time will a new mousetrap have been unleashed on the world? Will you be ringing the web three point oh bell two to three years from now?
Hot one today.
Andreas
Amazing, around 200 readers daily and I get a great response from someone internally. Thanks Andy!
If it’s cost effective and it’s a better mousetrap, I don’t care whose name is tied to it, G or Y!, at the very least try it out.
What real benefit to Talent Acquisition? Saving time, money, and actually hitting active and passive job seekers with smart keyword and geo-targeted campaigns would be a good start.
As for ringing bells, I’ll ring the 1.0 bell if the strategy works. When companies big or small rave and have case studies backing their methods, best practices, cost savings, process innovations etc. I’ll share it with the world.
You’re post got me thinking…
The search engines provide access to the Internet’s larger talent opportunity. The data you provided (and common sense) makes that clear.
Those employers still not incorporating search engines into their strategies are without question missing out on untapped top talent. I can say ‘top talent,’ because in the case of Yahoo!, 79% of the audience is employed full-time (comscore).
So, since that audience is abundant, qualified and intent on finding niche information (not necessarily looking for jobs) those employers willing to explore a passive strategy, and be the providers of the niche information that this talent seeks, will be rewarded with extremely valuable exposure to niche and local top talent.
So the question is not, can the search engines provide valuable access but rather are employers well enough informed to make decisions such as, ‘What should my passive strategy be?’ ‘What should my active strategy be?’ ‘How much budget should I allocate to each?’
And will they realize the branding value of search? Will they be able to tie their passive search strategy investment to their referral program metrics?
Impressive numbers but you are comparing apples to oranges. In google and yahoo’s billions of searches include many searches for porn or just web surfing in general that would skew the comarison to the job boarbs. I disagree with Andrews comments about the saturation. The search engine wars are constantly re-distributing the landscape and there will always be new innovative approaches to searches to compete with. I do agree that the internet is a much better source of candidates than any job board could ever be.
Twenty “job” or “career”-inclusive keywords yielded about 15 million searches on major search engines in January. Just twenty terms. Add more short-tail and the long-tail ‘job’ related searches, and the number of prospective candidates is material.
Most of that organic traffic today is directed to job-boards, which dominate 99% of the organic “job” related links.
The mission for employers is to have their jobs show up in those organic results, and drive traffic directly into their career sites or ATS.
Technically Google and Yahoo won’t enjoy a windfall when the allocation changes from job-board results to employer results; the page views and PPC revenues are the same (PPC will generate about 15-20% of the clicks off any given page).
The course for employers is simple: get your jobs and job categories indexed and ranked, and connect directly with actives & passives.
Matt, no question search engines can provide, and no employers are not yet educated to the point of making SEM mainstream. Thank you for your comment..
Moises, it is apples and oranges, no question. Search can provide passive and active seekers, where job boards can only provide the much smaller active population. Search can provide an enormous network and dynamic marketing opportunity, job boards cannot. It’s like comparing a new Ferrari to a Model-T, except in this case the Ferrari is cheaper.. Thank you for your comment..
Peter, agreed SEM should be used in tandem with a dynamic SEO strategy. SEO yourself to the hilt, while filling in your “optimization holes” with smart SEM. Together they provide a more flexible and cost effective recruiting search strategy. Thank you for your comment..