While free job ads have undoubted appeal, the enduring success of a jobs website lies in its ability to reach ALL of the potential job market including ‘people who don’t even know they want to move’, according to Paul Humberstone, general manager of jobla.
Humberstone says the online job board market started out in a very general way but has evolved into highly specialised niche products, better able to target particular industries or professional groups.
“When we saw the first online job boards launched many years ago, they were very broad products where you would have retail sales positions or telemarketing jobs being advertised alongside positions for chief scientists and web programmers.
“There are still plenty of those general online job boards around but the real growth has been in niche job boards where advertisers can target their message to the specific group of people they are interested in and job seekers can hone in on their target employer group.”
But according to Humberstone, the biggest challenge is reaching ‘passive’ job seekers – those people not actively looking to change jobs but whose interest might be sparked by coming across a job advertisement in the course of their business day.
“Even with a niche online job board for a particular sector or professional group, it is incumbent upon a job seeker to actually go to that site and hopefully to register with it to receive job alerts. So the traffic is very much ‘active’ job seekers.”
“The model we have adopted with jobla goes one step further, because the online job site is not only targeted to a specific industry but is linked to thousands of mostly middle and senior level people who actively subscribe to an e-news service about their sector or field of interest and expertise.”
“For example the jewellery industry section of the jobla site is connected to Jewellery World’s website and also appears on Jewellery World’s fortnightly e-newsletter which is emailed to a huge subscriber base of people right across the jewellery industry.
“There’s a ‘featured jobs’ panel displaying a changing list of the most recently listed jobs and a ‘job search widget’ at the bottom of the page. So basically, even if a person’s not looking for a job, it’s very easy for them to get a sense of what jobs might be available and then we’ve attracted the attention of a whole different category of potential job seekers,” he says.
Humberstone says the new online job board had received an unprecedented level of interest from both advertisers and job seekers since its launch in September.
“Because we were a new site, we can boast some amazing stats on our growth,” he says.
“For instance, there has been an 11,400 percent increase in the number of jobs posted between the 1st of October and the 30th of November – and an equally impressive 300 percent increase in the number of registered job users in the same period.
“The model is built on The Intermedia Group’s business media portfolio which publishes websites and e-newsletters for a variety of industries including local, state and federal government; energy and resources; film, TV and new media; consumer electronics; hospitality; retail; transport and logistics; and of course jewellery.
“The news websites and e-newsletters that The Intermedia Group publishes for each of these industries all carry jobla in the same way. So, if you’re an IT person working in a big consumer goods manufacturing group, you might be reading your weekly e-newsletter and notice an interesting IT job going within your own industry.
“Then when you click on that job, you might notice that there are actually a number of jobs across the different jobla sectors that are being advertised for someone with your skills. And before you know it, you’re thinking you’d quite like a change and you quite like the sound of working in a dynamic community care organisation where you can make a difference!”
“That’s the strategy and it is getting results,” Humberstone says.
As a launch initiative, all jobla advertisements are being offered free until December 31st 2011.