Job Search Engine Guide

Indeed Leaving Other Job Verticals in the Dust

What a difference a month makes! 

A few weeks ago the talk was about a MediaMetrix chart, posted by Marc Cenedella, showing unique visitors to SimplyHired surpassing Indeed during December 2005.  In SimplyHired Passes Indeed I said the reversal seemed surprising for a number of fundamental reasons.  And Joel Cheesman pointed out that Alexa data painted a different picture; yet the data did show a dramatic narrowing of the gap in “Reach” during December.   That’s history now.

During January, Indeed rolled out a string of innovations, partnered with Gawker to create a targeted micro-vertical job board, and today announced that the New York Times Job Market will begin offering visitors comprehensive job search powered by Indeed.com.  It’s not surprising then that Indeed experienced faster growth during the month than SimplyHired, Jobster and JobCentral.

Even with this accelerated growth, Indeed has maintained great performance.  According to Alexa, Indeed is faster than 72% of sites, while SimplyHired is slower than 67% of sites – the net difference is 1.2 seconds saved, on average, per page viewed on Indeed. And while 1.2 seconds may not sound like much, consider that a recent study found users make up their minds about a site during the first 1/20^th of a second.

GAWKER Jobs – Part 6) A Future in Small Money

We’re seduced by size – big houses, sport utility vehicles and mega-warehouse stores call to us with siren songs. Then reality intrudes – cleaning the castle is a drag, fuel purchases take our breath away, and shopping becomes a-battle-with-crowds-wandering-aisle-after-aisle-scanning shelves-that-stretch-to-the-ceiling-without-a-customer-service-rep-in-sight.

And then there is Starbucks; small stores, strategically located, focusing on the experience of coffee, with consistency and service.  Sometimes, after dealing with the reality of ‘big’, we like ‘small’.  But let’s be clear, while Starbucks’ locations are small, their market cap is $24 billion.  So there most definitely is money in ‘small’.

It is this concept of ‘money in small’ that prompted my first post: GAWKER Jobs – Part 1) Birth of a Targeted Job Ad Network.  Analogous to Starbucks’ strategy, in Gawker Jobs we see a micro-vertical job board delivering targeted job ads, extracted from Indeed’s comprehensive long-tail index, focused on meeting the needs of a small long-tail community.

Imagine thousands of diverse social communities; each with its own precisely targeted micro-vertical job board leveraging the index created by Indeed.  These community boards providing unique opportunities for local employers to connect with qualified active and passive candidates. 

What’s it worth to employers to get their job opportunities in front of qualified candidates? About $7 billion per year in North America is spent on Help Wanted ads.  But it isn’t really the ads that employers are buying.  They’re buying the elimination of the barrier between employer and job seeker.  The money is in improving and simplifying the connection between employers and qualified candidates.

A job ad network, with comprehensive coverage of the market, combined with technology to deliver highly precise ad listings to diverse social communities is in a unique position to capture the hearts and dollars of employers.  All of the necessary technology exists today – who will seize this opportunity?

This ends the Gawker Jobs series; and begins the journey towards development of a targeted job ad network.

GAWKER Jobs – Part 5) Envisioning the Next Generation

What would Gawker Jobs look like if the technologies described in part 4 of this series were applied today?

Keyword Search Morphs into Theme Search

Instead of searching for specific keywords (e.g. media) to populate the jobs displayed on Gawker, demographic information would be provided by the publisher and converted into Audience Positioning System coordinates.  These APS coordinates represent occupational interest areas for the readership.  Let’s assume, based on review of an APS analysis, Gawker’s publisher selects four occupational themes for Gawker Jobs: 1) Editors; 2) Reporters and Correspondents; 3) Public Relations Specialists; and, 4) Advertising Sales Agents.

Industry Focus Morphs into Occupational Focus

Although the media industry hires accountants, programmers, clerks, and managers (to name just a few occupations), these job ads are excluded from the next generation Gawker Jobs site when populating based on the four occupational themes above.  Applied to our 50% test data sample, 33 of the original 180 open jobs meet the new criteria.

Narrow Input Morphs into Broad Input

Let’s face it; a search for one word (e.g. Media) is incredibly narrow and misses a great deal of relevant content.  For example, searching for News* Editor on Indeed returns 463 job ads for New York City; but then adding the word Media reduces the result set by more than half to 202.  So when we search for the single word Media, we miss more than half of the News* Editor job ads in the City.  That’s not good!  In contrast, when Gawker Jobs is populated using occupational themes, based on Occupational Positioning System (OPS) coordinates assigned to each job ad, we’re no longer limited to searching by a few keywords.  As a result, the number of appropriately focused job ads increases by over 100%.

Broad Output Morphs into Narrow Output

In the current system, a search for Media occurs without context, resulting in job ads that are all over the occupation map – including biologists and hospital staff who work with media, plus a wide range of ancillary workers employed by media companies.   This broad output set is mostly ‘noise’ to Gawker job seekers (as determined by the occupational themes in this example).  In the next generation system, APS coordinates provide the context needed to select the appropriate job ads from Indeed’s long-tail index.

Scattered Results Morph into Organized Results

Instead of 400 job ads scattered across more than 50 occupations today, in the next-generation system we can expect roughly 150 precisely targeted ads, concentrated in the four occupational themes identified by the publisher as most relevant to Gawker readers. 

Compare the next-generation distribution illustrated above to the distribution in part 3 of this series.  Which looks better for a targeted micro-vertical job board?

Now compare the top 20 jobs displayed by the current system with the top 20 that would be displayed under the next-generation scenario.  Jobs in red drop out of the top 20, including ads for a Media Finance Manager, Strategic Planning Manager, Proposal Development Writer, Sector Specialist – Primary Research, and a Marketing Assistant.  Jobs in green enter the top 20, including ads for a Senior Writer/Editor, Editorial Manager, Editorial Coordinator, Media Associate, and Site Director – Parents.com.  Also notice how the jobs in the next-generation top 20 are grouped according to the four selected APS occupational themes: editors at the top, PR specialists next, reporters/writers, and then advertising sales associates.

The beauty of this next-generation Gawker Jobs proposal is that it remains a canned search.  But instead of passing in a keyword or two, the search looks for job ads matching occupational themes targeted at this specific long-tail social community.

GAWKER Jobs – Part 4) Micro-Vertical Targeting Solution

In part 3 of this 6-part series I closed with the statement:  “With better ad targeting, readers of Gawker Jobs could be singing the praises of a service that uniquely understands and meets their needs!”

Yet some believe that the targeting of job ads on Gawker is already excellent.  For instance, Fred Wilson (no relation), a Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures, states in his Instant Job Board post:  “Gawker Jobs is just a "canned search" on Indeed for media jobs in New York.  But when you go look at Gawker Jobs, you'll see that the featured jobs are perfect for Gawker's audience.”

I disagree with Fred.  After looking at the jobs in detail … not just the first 10 … and after reviewing customer feedback on the Gawker site, it seems perfection is yet to be achieved.  But it won’t be long before a major job board implements a precision targeting solution based on the following technologies:

OPS₄Jobs^TM – Occupational Positioning System^TM for Jobs

Job ads on Indeed have Geographic Positioning System (GPS) coordinates that are critical for selecting ads within a specified distance of a city – we take this functionality for granted.  Yet, until now, no system has existed for automating the assignment of Occupational Positioning System (OPS) coordinates to job orders.  OPS4Jobs precisely calculates the position of each job ad on a thematic map of occupations, and allows the retrieval of jobs ads within a specified distance of an occupation.

APS₄Jobs^TM – Audience Positioning System^TM for Jobs

Consider MapQuest – the site has a great index of GPS-coded locations and routing information; but the system is essentially useless until we precisely describe where we are.  Now compare this to Gawker Jobs – today, the system returns all jobs containing the word ‘media’, without first asking who’s the audience.  As a result, the job ads returned are all over the occupational map.  In contrast, APS4Jobs translates audience demographics into APS coordinates, so the search engine knows where the audience is, occupationally speaking, before searching for jobs.

BOOST₄Jobs^TM – Bounded Occupationally Optimized Search Technology^TM for Jobs

BOOST4Jobs adds APS and OPS coordinate focus to current vertical job search engine technology.  The resulting combination delivers job ads that precisely match the occupational characteristics of targeted audiences – creating precision micro-vertical job boards for an unlimited number of social communities.

Imagine the possibilities.  And stay tuned for part 5 in this series – an application of the above technologies to Gawker Jobs.

GAWKER Jobs – Part 3) Missing the Target

I’ve been gushing about Gawker Jobs – a micro-vertical job board delivering targeted job ads, extracted from Indeed’s comprehensive long-tail index, focused on the needs of a small long-tail community of media workers in New York City.  We’re witnessing the birth of a targeted job ad network.

On the other hand, feedback to the site has been less than glowing:

• “… metajobs is already done to death, and doesn't add much value to the site.”

• “Ah, something just as useless as mediabistro.”

• “I think I might still stick with the leaping off the Conde Nast building approach.”

What’s the problem?  Targeting! 

To populate the jobs on Gawker, Indeed searches for all jobs containing the word ‘Media’ in NY City.  Problem is, Media companies hire accountants, programmers, janitors … you name it.  And let’s face it, accountants and programmers just aren’t cool enough to read Gawker. ;-)

Analyzing the top 200 of 397 jobs on Gawker revealed that fifty occupations were represented, with no apparent distribution pattern.  A reader is just as likely to find a job ad for an Editor ranked 1^st as 100^th.   

Yet Gawker is, according to their web site, “…compulsory reading for New York editors and reporters”. 

With better ad targeting, readers of Gawker Jobs could be singing the praises of a service that uniquely understands and meets their needs!

GAWKER Jobs – Part 2) Marriage of Two Long Tails

Long Tail discussions and business plans are all the rage these days.  Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, coined the phrase “The Long Tail” in a Wired article in October 2004.  According to Chris:

“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”

Indeed, the vertical job search engine, is building a comprehensive long-tail index of available job ads; and while they don’t warehouse this inventory, they do make it easy for customers to explore the broad market for jobs. 

Still, even though access to the broad job market is extremely cool, individuals are often more interested in micro-markets – e.g. the market for editors in New York City – that reside in the tail of the universe of job ads.

GAWKER, an online media publication, is “…compulsory reading for New York editors and reporters” – clearly a small group in the long tail of social communities.

In GAWKER Jobs we see a micro-vertical job board delivering targeted job ads, extracted from Indeed’s comprehensive long-tail index, focused on meeting the needs of a small long-tail community.  Imagine a near-infinite number of diverse communities; each with its own targeted micro-vertical job board leveraging the index created by Indeed.  One source to serve them all.

In Where’s The Money In The Long Tail, David Hornik, a General Partner at August Capital, writes:  “I have come to the conclusion that there are essentially two general classes of technology that will benefit economically from the Long Tail – aggregators and filterers.”  In GAWKER Jobs, Indeed delivers!

GAWKER Jobs – Part 1) Birth of a Targeted Job Ad Network

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!”  Combining wood, acid, a funnel, and some copper wire, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson made history in 1876.  Few would have guessed that such a mundane message and crude contraption would usher in the mass communication network. 

History teaches us that the future is built from modest initial implementations of brilliant ideas.

GAWKER Jobs, delivered by Indeed, portends the future of a broad-based targeted job ad network.  And an exciting future it is!

Yet history also teaches us that some in the industry will undervalue the importance of GAWKER Jobs – just as the phone was dismissed:

'This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.' - Western Union internal memo, 1876.

It’s not surprising then that feedback on the GAWKER site has been less than enthusiastic.  Comments include:

• “I agree about the lame interface, and the lack of sifting ablitity by anything other than date posted. This type of thing should be an improvement on the stuff already out there to be worthwhile, no?”

• “When plugging in my particulars my search came up with:

mailroom

mailroom

messenger

mailroom assistant

Senior VP Mailroom Administration

Security

Mailroom Security

Administrative Assistant to the Senior VP of Mailroom Security.

and so on ...

I think I might still stick with the leaping off the Conde Nast building approach.”

• “… metajobs is already done to death, and doesn't add much value to the site. I'd rather have gawker post a list of three or four jobs per day-- handpicked by its editors, or even paid for by savvy media companies ($500/each?).”

• “Ah, something just as useless as mediabistro.”

Negative feedback is the 2^nd-best friend of innovation … money is 1^st J … it drives us forward.  The key is filtering out the noise, focusing on the message, and continuously refining the product. 

Marc’s History of Job Boards

Marc Cenedella, publisher of TheLadders, and previous SVP of HotJobs, is writing a great series on the history of job boards.  According to Marc, even though over 30,000 job boards have been started since 1990, “…there are remarkably few businesses of scale – in fact, perhaps as few as 6 that are grossing more than $10 mm a year – and even then the spoils go disproportionately to the big guys.  In the first few years of the internet, out of the thousand job boards started, only Monster, CareerBuilder (and its antecedents), HotJobs, Dice, and Craigslist surpassed $10 mm in annual revenue.  In the past decade … there hadn't been a job board that surpassed the $10 mm level until we crossed it last year.”

Great series Marc!  Thanks for sharing the perspective with us! 

Check out the full series at Marc’s blog, Rosetta Stone.

 

Jobseekusa.com – A New Vertical Job Search Site

Jobseekusa.com began beta-testing their new vertical job-search technology yesterday; and according to their press release, “Jobseekusa.com has developed the world’s first job-search engine to use Natural Language Processing to retrieve millions of fresh job listings nationwide.”

Damon Levy, CEO of Jobseekusa.com, LLC. Is quoted as saying “Our goal is to provide users with a unique job-search experience they cannot and will not find with any of our competitors”.

At this early point in the beta, Jobseekusa is still refining their interface and growing their jobs database.  Damon told me today that they have around 400k jobs, and expect to have 1.5- to 2-million jobs when in production.

It’s way too early to make judgments about this new entrant; but there are some promising features … e.g. a relevance meter for each matching job, a simple interface, and the promise of higher accuracy made possible by NLP technology.

Welcome to the Vertical Job Search Engine club Jobseekusa!

JobCentral – Searching for Relevance

JobCentral is searching for relevance – something they lost with the explosive growth in vertical job search sites (e.g. Indeed and SimplyHired) and with the emergence of free job classified sites (e.g. Craigslist, Google Base and Windows Live Expo).

A quick glance at the Alexa Daily Traffic Rank Trend for the past two years tells the story.  Note that DirectEmployers launched the JobCentral brand in 2005, and that most of their traffic moved to this new site.

This week, in a New York Times article, press releases (1, 2) and a clarifying memo by Bill Warren, Director of DirectEmployers and JobCentral, posted by Joel Cheesman (thanks Joel!), JobCentral announced a new National Labor Exchange (resume program) and a partnership “with SimplyHired to provide access to over four million job listings.”

No question that JobCentral will get an immediate bump in traffic from the news; but unless they find a niche, or invest heavily, they’ll remain irrelevant.  Here’s why:

1. Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs are far ahead of JobCentral in the resume market, and the big three will most certainly outspend JobCentral to attract jobseekers.

2. JobCentral’s search engine is less precise than Indeed’s and SimplyHired’s; and member jobs are listed before non-member jobs, further reducing the usefulness of the search results to jobseekers.  So, if all of JobCentral’s jobs are on Indeed and SimplyHired, why search on JobCentral?

3. Jobs from SimplyHired are searched separately from native jobs on JobCentral.  So although JobCentral now provides access to 4.5 million jobs, they force users to look at 10% in the initial search, and then ask users to click on a tab to see the remaining 90%.

4. Jobs from SimplyHired are displayed with less detail on JobCentral, making it harder for job seekers to identify the most relevant jobs.  Again, it makes more sense to go to the source.

5. JobCentral’s business model suffers from a free rider problem that makes it difficult to raise the funds needed to compete with successful firms in the job space that are driven by a profit motive.

Are there reasons why JobCentral remains relevant?  Will they gain back the market share they’ve lost?  Will job seekers, in mass, choose JobCentral over Monster, CareerBuilder or HotJobs for posting their resumes?  Let the discussion begin.