CareerBuilder CEO Discusses Monster, Social Media, Job Board Future
Matt Ferguson doesn’t see pay for performance replacing the pay to post model for job boards anytime soon, if ever. Nor have the job aggregators had much of an impact on the business.
Rather, says CareerBuilder’s CEO, it’s social media in all its forms that poses the biggest threat to the job board industry. The “biggest threat and the biggest opportunity,” he said in a conference call Wednesday with a group of analysts and others.
Arranged by Stifel Financial Corp., Ferguson shared his take on the economy, the job board business, and competitor Monster during a free-ranging 45 minutes Q&A.
Not surprisingly, Ferguson took a few swipes at the Monster, shrugging off the company’s $100 million investment in a site redesign and, especially, in a new, enhanced resume search.
Despite the chatter about Monster’s Power Resume Search on blogs and elsewhere, Ferguson said he has yet to hear it mentioned by any of CareerBuilder’s customers. What’s more, he suggested the new search tool may be limited in its usefulness, since corporate recruiters do much of their work via an ATS.
“They have not integrated” the new Monster tools with the systems, Ferguson said, adding that for CareerBuilder, “It’s business as usual… We have had a recommend engine for five years.”
He declined to discuss the size of CareerBuilder’s international business, saying he wouldn’t talk about a report the company’s dollar volume was in the $50 million range. Acknowledging that Monster had the lead in Europe — but suggesting that might not be true in most of the rest of the world — Ferguson said CareerBuilder was “closing the gap in traffic.”
However, in the pay-for-performance area, Ferguson was adamant that it wasn’t gaining traction within the job board industry, despite Monster’s suggestion that variable pricing for resumes (at least) could be in the company’s future.
“I don’t see it going to a price per hire,” he said. “It’s still an advertising medium.”
Nor, he said, does he feel the pay-to-post model is threatened by the job search engines.
Services like Indeed, which just celebrated its fifth birthday, and SimplyHired, collect job listings from across the web and aggregate them so job seekers don’t have to conduct multiple searches. By using freely available applications, content publishers and other job boards can make some or all of the aggregated jobs available on their own site.
The sites have aggressively promoted a pay-for-click pricing model that allows an employer to get higher visibility for their position, while paying only when a job seeker clicks on their post.
While the traffic Indeed and SimplyHired receive have pushed them into the top tier of job sites, Ferguson said, “I don’t know that the aggregators have had much impact.” Their biggest customers, he said, “have been the job boards themselves.”
Social media such as LinkedIn does present a challenge to the traditional job board industry, Ferguson said, noting that CareerBuilder has a partnership deal with Facebook. The site itself doesn’t present a direct threat to job boards, at least not the way LinkedIn does, he added. But, “social media in aggregate” does.
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Comments
Great article, however I believe the future of the job search will be in matched based, dating like websites that allow the users to build profiles and specify what they want in a job. This model will allow jobs to apply to the person automatically rather than having people apply to jobs. This increases that amount of applicants, providing better applicants for the employer. this will also provide a vetting system for employers ( matching). A good website that is utilizing this model is http://DreamFetcher.com . I recommend signing up for this service because they contact you when a job wants you, much like a college career center.
For more information on this type of website, check out http://blog.dreamfetcher.com. I honestly think this model is the way to go.
I like your position on the entire social networking model. Why would I use a social media to get a respectable position from “friends” that I know or don’t know? I think Careerbuilder.com should focus on calling on business that have”real job openings” and place them on their web-site.
Sandra,
The reason that you would wnat to go to a social media route is because of the amount of free data that you can have access too. I recruited for a number of years and I cant tell you how great it is to tell people to follow me on twitter, facebook, or linkedin to keep an eye out for what jobs that I have coming in on a daly basis. Of course i always try to pick up the phone and try to connect with them that way. But a job seeker wants fast action bc they need a job. its all about free data and putting a face to whom your working with.. Social Media will take over just due to the cost and face to face contact.. : )