Jun
05
2008
From Shortlist on Tuesday (subscription required):
MyCareer traffic down sharply, SEEK and CareerOne rising
SEEK and CareerOne grew their candidate traffic during March, while MyCareer posted a large drop, according to the latest Nielsen Online data.
SEEK tracked 206,803 average unique daily browsers during the month, up 2.7%.
CareerOne moved back into the number-two spot, rising 0.8% to 64,204 average daily browsers.
Fairfax Digital - which includes MyCareer and the IT site IT2 - fell 12.6% to 57,498 daily browsers for the month.
I wouldn’t call 0.8% much of a rise, more like treading water and CareerOne have actually lost 0.6% RMS (Relative Market Share). However, the real news here is this represents a fall of nearly 5% RMS for MyCareer.
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Oct
06
2007
The new CareerOne site has launched. It looks pretty good. New logo/brand is much cleaner. The site overall is a big improvement, so well done to the C1 team. As usual, Brett is on the case and has his own analysis.
Observations:
- It appears they have dumped the Endeca search engine in favour of the Funnelback search engine. This is an interesting choice.
- Significant portions of the site are still powered by Adicio, including the Job Email, Resume Centre and for some odd reason the Job Details.
- The keyword search is fairly ordinary. A search for chief information officer in Sydney, NSW in the IT & T category returned jobs such as “NSW Police Officer”, “PABX Technician” and “TRAINEE PARAPLANNING ROLE - DEVELOP YOUR EXISITNG SKILLS!”. Seek’s search engine clearly leads in the aspect. However, this may have as much to do with CareerOne’s job content and demographic as the search engine.
- The Salary Survey feature is just links to Hays PDF’s. Nowhere nearly as complete and well-thought out both Seek’s one (why can’t you get to it from their homepage?) and MyCareer’s salary survey section.
- CareerOne’s training feature is just a page of advertising. Obviously, with a major portion of Seek’s business in their Learning division, their training site is much more comprehensive. MyCareer’s training feature is a step in between, being a listing of Open Uni courses.
- The Self employment feature is also just a page of advertising. Again, Seek’s commercial site outstrips this. MyCareer doesn’t even have an offering here.
- The Videos feature looks interesting. The key here will be for them to keep adding content and keep it up-to-date.
- The Career Advice section is actually probably the strongest of the sector. MyCareer’s career advice is also very strong. These should probably be expected given the editorial/newspaper heritage of both sites. Seek’s section is fairly minimal.
Overall? Good result. Great to finally see their new site. Although they’ve hit well short of the promises made to the market and have still got plenty of ground to improve, the new site and brand are good and should provide a good platform to build on.
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Oct
05
2007
After about a 12 month delay, the new CareerOne website will finally be launched from this weekend. After having nearly sent one Sydney-based web development company crashing in flames (cost of the project blew out well past $1.2mil$5mil apparently), its good to see that News have been able to finally launch the website. Hopefully it lives up to all the hype.
It appears this cutover was better timed to co-incide with a weekend than the previous one several years ago which took the site down in the middle of the week for several days.
The new website comes with a new brand which will be rolling out across News papers over the coming weeks.
UPDATE: Make that over $5mil for build.
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Sep
06
2007
We don’t have enough job boards in Australia
…that must be the thought racing through many a budding “Web 2.0″ entrepreneur who may be thumbing through Seek’s latest results - revenue up 47.8%, EBITDA growth of 63.9% to $80.3 million.
Brett posted an entry today on the beta launch of yet another job board (YAJB), jobx.com.au, which sparked a bit of a rant from me in his comments section. Similar sentiments followed the jobsjobsjobs.com.au launch back in June, again as covered by Brett.
For a country with a population the size of Australia, its simply astounding that people think it can accommodate more than 2 generalist job boards. At the moment, those two are Seek and MyCareer (as rated by Nielsen//NetRatings). Over 3 million people frequent these sites every month. Given that the entire working-age population is around 13 million, that would suggest that a quarter of the working age population is actively looking on these two job boards. The leader in the market, Seek has 3.7x lead on its nearest competitor (MyCareer) [Source: Seek financial report 2007]
This entry of jobx.com.au follows several other recent entrants:
- jobs.com.au - backed by financial management company KFG, it splashed out $4 million on idiotic TV campaigns and a site that could only be used by “signing up”-providing your contact details to KFG, or a “two way street” as Scott Kirkwood, KFG’s Managing Director called it, “We offer a full range of financial services to Jobs.com.au members, while at the same time Jobs.com.au acts as a referral service for KFG.” Yep, that sounds two way. It was such a high value service that it (thankfully) folded up a few agonising months after launch.
- jobsjobsjobs.com.au - started by Guy Sigston, who built up Lloyd Morgan before punting it to Candle Recruitment for a cool $9 mil in January 2006. My understanding is that Guy left the business as CEO in May this year, interestingly around the time that the site launched. The site has been heavily promoted by some rather odd/disturbing floating heads on buses, billboards, coffee cups and even Boost drinks. Technically, the site is not bad and is head and shoulders above both jobs.com.au and jobx.com.au. I’m just not sure there’s anything different enough to make it compelling to switch from the two big incumbents. I think it may also be headed for the Australian Job Board Dead Pool as well, but it will probably not have quite the quick and dramatic death that jobs.com.au did.
And that brings us to jobx.com.au. I get the distinct feeling that (a) the designer of the site is a technophile first and a business person second and (b) having failed to come up with a compelling raison d’etre, they went back to their techie roots and thought of all the “cool Web 2.0″ things to add into a site and have tried to jam-pack all these things into the site:
- Obligatory “Beta” tag…check
- User generated content…check
- Tags…check
- Podcasts…check
- Social networking…check
- User ratings…check
- Wikis…check
Buzzword compliant, yes. Solving a real need, no.
Prospective generalist job board starter-uppers (”entrepreneurs”) out there take note : we don’t have a “find a job” problem. That problem has been solved. Another job board is not needed in this market. Unless you can come up with a truly compelling, game changing proposition…save your money and time. The market is red from the intense competition of the 2-3 big players (each probably spending on the order of $10-20 million just in sales and marketing every year) [Source: Seek financial reports].
My recommendation? Read Blue Ocean Strategy. Identify a real need in the market which isn’t being adequately serviced.
Launch a compelling service to meet that need.
Just don’t launch a job board.
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