It’s the recruiters, stupid!
August 18th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Jobs have long been targeted on the web. The economics involved are attractive. People want good jobs and employers are willing to pay for good employees.
In the last ten years, hundreds of businesses have launched with the goal of using the web to bring efficiencies to job markets and capturing value in the process. As a result, newspaper classifieds have died, consumed almost entirely by dynamic, searchable sites with tens of millions of listings.
Recruiters and headhunters, on the other hand, haven’t gone anywhere.
In fact, the most successful employment focused sites all rank recruiters among their most loyal users. Monster, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, BountyJobs, CraigsList, KnowledgeBid (my company), HotJobs, and Facebook are used by recruiters to search profiles, send messages, create connections, run advertisements, make referrals, and post listings. All this while sites that have tried to cut recruiters out of the employment equation have in large part failed.
The web has given recruiters access to hundreds of millions of user profiles and inexpensive niche job postings. The technology shift has changed how recruiters do their jobs, and it’s arguable that the explosion of information on the web has made them more valuable. Either way recruiters are certainly the heaviest users of job technology, so if you’re planning on launching a business in this space you’d best make sure they’re included.
I’d argue that a lot of the job boards you mention above — especially monster and career builder — are used almost exclusively by recruiters. They’re what we call at my office “resume thickets”. No one wants to take the time to sift through them. When you hire a recruiter, or even post a job to a recruiting marketplace like Dayak, what you’re paying for is for the recruiter to do all that for you.
That having been said, I think Craigslist, which is a great local classified, and Linked In, which needs no glossing on my count, are kind of in a different league, and serve different purposes. Which isn’t to say that recruiters don’t use them. The staffing industry has been taking some hard hits lately like everything else but it’s definitely not going anywhere.