Jobs Vertical Search
Gary over at Search Engine Watch has news of Business.com’s venture into job vertical search, work.com. The release includes this hint of their business model: "Advertisers on Work.com pay only for the candidates that click to their jobs on their website".
Recruitment is a rather deceptive category of vertical search because so much money is spent on recruitment advertising in both newspapers and the Internet. Indeed, online it is the largest category of classifieds advertising, and if you count classifieds as search, the largest category of search marketing overall.
But there is one very subtle difference between jobs and every other category that makes performance marketing tough to overlay. In no other category does the advertiser end up paying the consumer (i.e. if a success the employer ends up paying the employee a salary). Every other category, the consumer ends up buying something from the advertiser (i.e. consumer $ -> advertiser).
This creates slightly different incentives. The incentive of candidates is to apply to positions above and beyond their capabilities. Just try posting a job ad on Monster and seeing the sea of garbage you get back. If you are paying for every one of those clicks - let along resume applications - that can be a problem.
The advertiser wants quality rather than quantity but under a cost per click or performance-based pricing model (save for CPA), the incentive of the jobs vertical search engine is to maximize the number of leads they refer to employers.
Honestly, I don’t have a solution, but the vertical search sites will need to come up with one if they hope to succeed.
