Job Bored
A few days ago I took a look at the soon to be launched search.co.uk, a job board from the people behind the Search recruitment consultancy.
Andrew makes some very valid points about the “revolutionary” nature of their offer, or lack thereof. But my first glance concerns were slightly different.
What the hell is going on with the job board market?
Social media is in many ways still finding it’s feet as a recruiting platform, but gaining speed rapidly so right now should be, if not the heyday for job boards then at least a chance to make some hay.
But what are the major job boards doing? Either plodding on as per usual or occasionally dressing their site up in a pretty new frock and passing it off as something incendiary and revolutionary. This is going to sound like I’m very down on job boards. I’m not, I think they have a definite place in the marketing mix. But, it’s increasingly frustrating to see them cast themselves as cutting edge, without really doing much to earn it.
So, what about search.co.uk? As a site it feels like a bit of a greatest hits approach to a job board. The personalisation of Monster, meets an Adwords style pay per application model and finally, hey lets throw in ads for houses, cars and classifieds to boot. Those Fish4 fellas do it and it seems to work for them.
Well, yes, but Fish4 has it roots in the local press and as such has a ready source of content to draw from and a national network of publications to market the service in.
Search however, are a recruitment consultancy, i’m intrigued to know where they’re planning to source the content from for the other sections and how well they’ll function.
So what does search.co.uk have going for it? Well, it’s a fantastic domain name, you almost wonder what the hell they’ve been sitting on such a valuable property for so long for!
Also, the design is pretty good, clean and bright; certainly as good if not better than the recently relaunched (and still rather leaky) monster.co.uk which continues to be fussy and overcomplicated.
So, is anyone doing anything other than smear the same pig in a different lipstick?
There are a few sites trying out new models, last year theladders.co.uk launched with a proposition built around only listing roles with salaries over 50k and, get this, charging candidates to sign up to the site. You’ve got to admire the chutzpah, and it seems to have paid off with double the number of new members in the first year than predicted. But I suspect that maybe all is not quite as rosy as it seems given that they’ve recently quietly relaxed the rules and included viewing roles in the free basic membership. Paying 10 quid a month now gets you a critique of your CV, a personalised salary report and some unspecified tools to “manage your career search”…so what do I get in month two?!
Jiibe.com for example lets users answer “psychometric” questions which compare their current and their ideal workplaces and then use that crowdsourced data to recommend workplaces that might suit. Ultimately though, it’s a sucky user experience. You answer an interminable number of questions, some of which are repeated more than once and a list of workplaces is dynamically updated at the left hand side.
You very quickly realise though that the company reviews are actually just a selection of badly cobbled together statements with some vague relation to the traits you indicated a preference for. The recruitment equivalent of a psychic doing a cold reading.
At least you don’t have to cross their palm with silver…yet.
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