Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 31, 2009 22:51:14 GMT -5
E-COMMERCE REPORT
Online Searchers for Job Seekers
By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: March 28, 2005
OVER the last year, more people have turned to sites like www.Shopping.com and www.Kayak.com to avoid the hassle of clicking around to find travel or shopping bargains. Now a handful of new companies are lining up to provide similar services for job seekers.
While the big search engines refine their more generalized search approach, companies like www.Indeed.com , www.SimplyHired.com and www.WorkZoo.com have in recent weeks introduced services that scan both well-known and obscure employment boards on the job seeker's behalf. In doing so, these companies may earn praise from Internet users, analysts said, even if Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo's HotJobs cannot determine if they are friends or foes.
"If you're Monster, you're saying 'Gee, what's my value proposition?' " said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research www.forrester.com/ in Cambridge, Mass. "Will all the traffic go to Monster or Indeed?"
In the short term, the big job sites seem willing to let the search sites scan their listings and send them customers - unlike sites in the travel category. Many online travel agencies have refused to let Kayak, Mobissimo and Farechase from Yahoo conduct similar searches.
On Monday, www.Indeed.com will announce its official debut after several months of testing. The company, based in Stamford, Conn., said there would be more than 2.5 million jobs in its database on a typical day, from more than 500 sites.
On www.Indeed.com 's home page, visitors are greeted with a simple search box that prompts them to type in the title or description of the job they are interested in (or the specific company), and a location. A search last week for "marketing analyst" and "Chicago," for instance, produced a list of 772 job listings culled from www.monster.com , www.careerbuilder.com , hotjobs.yahoo.com and America's Job Bank ( www.Jobsearch.org ), among others. Adding a search term, "production planning analyst," narrowed the list to eight.
Paul Forster, Indeed's chief executive, said that the Web site, which has been running in test mode for a few months, is on pace to attract a million job searches this month without any marketing.
Mr. Forster and his co-founder, Rony Kahan, previously ran a financial jobs site, www.JobsInTheMoney.com , which they sold in late 2003 to Financial News, an investment news publisher. "From that, we realized the drawbacks of job boards," Mr. Forster said. "There was an obvious gap for a search engine that enables seekers to search multiple sites."
That gap has always existed, of course - as have companies that have tried to fill it. www.FlipDog.com, for instance, started in early 2000 with technology that searched employer Web sites for listings, thereby helping job seekers circumvent the big boards. According to Forrester Research, those big boards together cover 71 percent of all listings.
Monster bought FlipDog in 2001 for an undisclosed sum, in a move that Ms. Li of Forrester characterized as "getting rid of the competition." She said that FlipDog, which is still in operation, would have struggled as an independent business because "the advertising model wasn't there."
The difference now, Ms. Li said, is Google. Through the company's AdSense network, Google places ads on Web site publishers' pages, and pays the publisher each time someone clicks on the ad. "When someone searches for a Java programming job, there are advertisers who want to sell stuff specifically to Java programmers," she said.
Google presumably loves the fact that the job search engines are supporting its AdSense business, but not at the expense of its primary mission of attracting search users to its site. Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokeswoman, would not say whether the company was developing a competing job search service along the lines of its Froogle shopping search service.
Yahoo is in a particularly interesting position in this regard. As a search engine it, too, would be expected to directly compete with the job search companies. But such a service could point users to listings on sites other than its own HotJobs.
Dan Finnigan, executive vice president and general manager of Yahoo HotJobs, would not comment on the possibility of Yahoo developing a competing job search service. But he said that if it did start a service that essentially funneled users to sites other than HotJobs, such an effort would not necessarily run counter to Yahoo's overall business approach. He pointed out that Yahoo already displays ads from the other major job boards near www.Yahoo.com 's search results.
"It's easy to start one of these search engines," Mr. Finnigan said. "But it's very difficult to do one that meets the user's expectations. To satisfy that audience, you have to be very sophisticated in providing relevant results. The billions we've invested in search gives us a head start in figuring out what will make a searcher happy."
If the job boards so chose, they could make life more difficult for the job search engines by thwarting the engines' attempts to cull job postings. So far, though, the job boards appear willing to accept the free referrals.
Gautam Godhwani, chief executive of www.SimplyHired.com , which is based in Mountain View, Calif., said that if a job board refused to be included in his site's listings, it would simply lose that traffic. "To the extent these guys can help us get their results into our database, it means more traffic to them," he said.
CareerBuilder, for one, appears willing to buy his argument. Jennifer Sullivan, a CareerBuilder spokeswoman, said the company already distributed its listings on more than 450 other Web sites, and saw the new companies "as additional distribution channels."
For the job search sites to succeed with advertisers, though, they must generate significantly more traffic than they do now. WorkZoo, SimplyHired and Indeed executives all spoke in vague terms about teaming with major online companies in the coming weeks and months to generate more awareness for their services.
Mr. Godhwani, who introduced SimplyHired earlier this month, said his company could eventually start charging for "premium" services like matching companies with specific job candidates. Currently the company is, as its founders described it, "self-funded." (Mr. Godhwani and his brother Anil sold AtWeb, a vendor of software that helped Web sites improve their services, to Netscape in 1998.)
Employment search sites seem seems well positioned to gain the attention of investors. According to Ms. Li, the online job search category grew 35 percent last year, compared to annual growth of just 8 percent in 2003. www.Monster.com 's United States revenues reached about $450 million last year, she said, while CareerBuilder and HotJobs reached $250 million and $125 million, respectively.
"The key thing is that with the recovery, people are hiring again," Ms. Li said. "So everybody's coming back."
www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/technology/28ecom.html