In the last few years we have seen a shift in employment marketing from newspaper advertising, to job boards like Monster and Workopolis, then interactive job boards like LinkedIn, and now we have seen an explosion of job aggregator sites.
What exactly is a job aggregator? They are websites that take jobs posted on company websites and job boards and repost these jobs to drive traffic to their website. By reposting all of the jobs they find they are able to attract tens of thousands of job seekers to their sites every month.
Like Google they sell pay per click advertising to fund their operations. The difference between job aggregators and traditional job boards is: aggregators only earn revenue from an employer if they want to be first in a search by paying for a premium link and the job seeker clicks on the link. Job aggregators also earn money with pay per click advertising and banner advertisements which can have nothing to do with employment.
Job boards on the other hand, charge companies to post jobs but they pay regardless of if people click on the job, apply to it, or even if the job is never viewed by potential job seekers..
The job aggregators also make it very easy for companies to post their jobs, even picking up all the jobs off your website if you use a computer coding called xml.
In Canada, Workopolis and Monster have seen a large decrease in numbers of job seekers and employers visiting and paying for their sites. Year to date drops in traffic are as much as 35-42% compared to last year, even with large numbers of unemployed people looking for work.
LinkedIn on the other hand has seen large growth and hopes to take away business from the leading job boards in Canada, the US and around the world. They are charging between $200 per job posting $10-$30,000 for large companies to have a career page on LinkedIn and $5000 per person/year to access their database. LinkedIn is encouraging its members to create content and invite friends to drive candidates and it is working, with about 14 million people visiting last month.
Facebook fan pages are also taking off as the second most popular site in the world, with career fan pages being built and pay per click advertising being used by recruiters. Finally, the worlds most visited and most powerful internet player is Google. Most job searches start on Google and the word “job” is used in almost more searches than any other word (the only exception being when Christmas bumps the word Job out of top spot in December). Will Google make a serious push into helping market jobs? Only time will tell….