Jun 16 2008

LinkedIn has critical mass in Australia; job boards fans

Published by sethyates under Business

Over the past few months, LinkedIn as a professional networking and recruiting tool has really come into its own in Australia.  These days, it is somewhat difficult to find an executive (not counting the very top strata of the ‘C’ level) or recruiter who isn’t using it.  My LinkedIn “Network Updates” feed runneth over.

Five years ago, when I first joined LinkedIn, I saw the huge potential of the site and thought it would be a success—if they managed to not screw it up and could monetise it properly.  Now, with a still loyal and growing user base and US$100m revenues in 2008, it looks like they have done just that and will be the first social network to IPO sometime early 2009.

With absolutely no marketing in Australia, LinkedIn has built almost half a million users in Australia as Jorge has pointed out.  I believe LinkedIn has caught the major job boards asleep (or at least complacent) and now poses a clear and present danger to Seek Executive and TheBigChair/MyCareer.  While most of the top executive jobs have traditionally been  filled via networks and search (and this is clearly where LinkedIn plays), I believe this will increasingly become the case for other senior professional/executive roles.  Although LinkedIn won’t eat the job boards’ lunches, it definitely has the potential to constrain their growth in this lucrative segment.

But it looks like the job boards, rather than taking an adversarial stance, are embracing LinkedIn.  MyCareer are hiring, and they’re using LinkedIn to do so.  I just received this in my LinkedIn Inbox today:

If you have a moment, I’d appreciate your help. Please take a look and forward this job on to anyone you think would be interested in the position, or anyone else who could help me find a great candidate.

Thanks for your help!
-M

Company: MyCareer
Job Title: Business Development Manager
Description: Mycareer.com.au is one of Australia’s leading job sites and part of Fairfax Digital, Australia’s leading provider of News, Finance and Classifieds on the Internet and is a subsidiary of Fairfax Media Limited, publisher of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

Enjoying unprecedented growth, as a consequence of new product innovation and demand for online advertising solutions, mycareer.com.au is currently searching for a person to sell recruitment advertising packages.The successful candidate will be responsible for engaging, managing and developing their client base.

To meet the challenges of this role, you will ideally be tertiary qualified in a business related discipline and possess a sound working knowledge and understanding of the Internet and online business models. This is an exciting role for a tenacious and switched-on business developer who has previous direct sales experience. Additional experience in the Recruitment or Online industries will be well regarded.

If you are a self-driven professional who enjoys working in a progressive environment, interested applicants please apply online quoting the reference number.

Oh and if you’re interested in applying, here’s the link.

So, the question is: if you’re a job board, what do you do about LinkedIn?  Do you embrace and surround, integrate like SimplyHired?  Do you fight?  Will LinkedIn actually grow the market instead of taking market share?  Or do you not see them as a threat?

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Jun 05 2008

CareerOne takes second spot again after sharp traffic decline at MyCareer

Published by sethyates under Business

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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Sep 06 2007

We don’t have enough job boards in Australia

Published by sethyates under Business

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:

  1. Obligatory “Beta” tag…check
  2. User generated content…check
  3. Tags…check
  4. Podcasts…check
  5. Social networking…check
  6. User ratings…check
  7. 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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