The Electronic Recruiting News

This is what John says about himself and ERNIE:

The Electronic Recruiting NewsDeveloped by John Sumser for Human Resource Professionals, Headhunters, Placement Firms and Recruiting Agencies on the Net. The Electronic Recruiting News includes tips, trends and analysis of players, events and occurrences in the Recruiting Industry. Updated daily.

And you would think,… just another marketing gimp! Well the truth is that ERNIE is the BEST online resource about online recruitment that there is. As simple as that. If you are serious about online recruitment you should read ERNIE! Daily! Not only that John is a person who knows the business inside out, but is also funny! In today’s post John speaks about niche job boards, that we mentioned in the Irish job applications – Quality vs. Quantity yesterday. Here is from the today’s article article:

Niche Boards: The Problem (September 13, 2006) "Hey, what if we had a job board? The ads would sell themselves. It would be like free money. Uh, yes, uh, could you pass that bong back this way?" - overheard at a recent blog company strategic planning session.

Craig has a good thing going. Without much in the way of a sales crew, Craigslist manages to print money with its employment ads. Ask anyone else with a job board, however, and you'll learn one thing fast: Revenue is a function of the number of salespeople. In any organization with more than 100 people, the budget for Recruitment Advertising spending is owned by someone in the HR Department. The key to earning their business is to identify them and to satisfy their wants, desires and needs. This is what companies in the job board business do.

If you were wondering how Monster beat the newspapers while automating the business that the newspapers owned lock, stock and barrel, there's only one answer: a strong outbound sales force. The newspapers have never been willing to muster an aggressive sales team, they hire minimum wage order takers. They lost the classified advertising game to Monster and Craigslist because they refused to invest in sales people.

Perhaps you were wondering what Monster's current market advantage is. It's that same sales force. Duplicating it and its web of relationships would cost as much as a Billion dollars. Without an investment in sales and marketing and a commitment to serve a specific niche of HR specialists, job board operations have severely limited horizons. It's simple. No sales force, no money...

Oh, there's another teensy weensy little problem. Job boards don't deliver what they advertise. The real product at the big players is resume database access. The new niche boards are asserting that the quality of their audience is an adequate alternative. We'd bet that most of that audience is already on file at Monster.

A job board should be a conversation in which expectations are examined and leveled. One of the saddest things about the emergence of a new flock of niche job boards is how slavishly they adhere to the very flawed classified advertising model...

It's about to be a really exciting time in the job board business. We're seeing things, just over the horizon, that promise expanded interactivity and real movement towards solving actual recruiting problems.

Although most of the samples are related to the American recruitment market, you will be able to recognize parallels with the Irish Online Jobs sites or portals. Just a few questions to stimulate a mind process of any Irish recruiter:

1. What Irish job site has the best sales team?

2. What job board am I paying the most?

3. Do the answers to the first two questions mach?

And some more:

4. Do I get CVs from Irish Niche job sites that I do not get from the market leaders – large generalist job sites? Or just duplicates?

5. Does my job board provide me with a useful CV search functionality?

Running a job site in Ireland today is not an easy thing to do. This is where Ireland is completely in sync with the States. Problems of Irish recruiters are quite similar to the ones in the States, while the difference of the size of the market brings in it’s own disadvantages to the Irish recruiters.