Thursday, September 21, 2006

Google vs. Irish Job Boards (1:0)


All Irish recruiters are advertising their jobs in Ireland where? – On Irish job portals.

There is no serious recruitment agency that does not use the services of the Irish Jobs, Recruit Ireland, Employ Ireland, Monster, and a list of so called niche job sites.

In the same time there is only a dozen (literally!) recruitment agencies that use Google AdWords to attract Irish job hunters. And even worse there is no single agency working on the search engine optimization of their Irish recruitment web site.

In the same time all the Irish job boards are using Google AdWords to drive the traffic, and work really hard on the search engine optimization of their job sites.

So where we are is that the Irish recruitment agencies are in fact outsourcing all the traffic generation activities to the Irish job boards. If we look from a log distance the money flow actually starts with an Irish Employer, who pays for the employee hired to the Irish recruitment agency. The Irish Recruitment agency pays the Irish job board to advertise. Irish job board pays Google to get them the relevant traffic of the people looking fro the job in Ireland. Google then pays a portion of that to the web site owners who display Google AdSense ads on their pages.

In all of those steps each party ads a value added service. A service after service after service…

Depending from what perspective you look at it, you will find a different part of that fairly long food chain obsolete.

Let’s look for view of the Irish recruitment agency. The money flows in for every placement they make. The money flows out to the Irish job sites. The difference of those two figures, minus the running costs and taxes are the profits of the Irish recruitment agency. Any decrease of the costs, especially external costs where the largest are the subscriptions to the job boards, will ultimately increase the profit. The obvious step is to cut the Irish job sites. Irish recruitment agency has an option that Google makes possible with their AdSense programme, to purchase web traffic, and relevant web traffic – people looking for a job in Ireland. By doing so the Irish recruitment agency bypasses the Irish job boards. Knowing that the owners of the job boards are fairly well off people (O’Brian, Crosbie, etc), it is obvious,… well take a guess yourself what the savings are.

Or even better! Let us no guess it! Let us do the comparison. Imagine that you the same amount of money every month into your Google AdWords account as much you pay your monthly subscription fee to the Irish job board. Do if for a month. Monitor where is each CV coming from to your CV database. Monitor the quality of CVs by identifying the source of the CV of each placement you make that month. One thing is for sure. There is no way any Irish job site can give you as much CVs as Google AdWors can. Even more you can target your visitors Geographically in your AdWords campaign, that will result in a far better quality of CVs, and higher CV/placement ratio.

Conclusion

No Irish job board stand a chance against Google AdWords in helping the Irish recruitment agency to make more placements.

…and only a dozen, at the time of writing this are advertising with Google AdWords, where all are publishing to Irish job boards, and in most cases (90%) to multiple Irish job boards.

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