An Insight Into Job Search Engines

Practically everyone out there is now accustomed to utilising the services of the online job board; in fact since its initial inception in 1993 (with the advent of the Online Career Centre) the online job market has become a booming global business and far outweighs traditional methods of job seeking.

A 'relatively' new concept for the online recruitment industry is the job aggregator or vertical search engine with the first comers to the market being Indeed and Simply Hired in the US circa 2005.

These websites crawled other career related sites (jobboards, company career sites) and displayed all of the vacancies to prospective candidates without the need for the candidate having to seek out these vacancies for themselves. The vacancies are displayed in a slimmed down version eliminating much of the content but displaying key factors such as job-title, location, salary and a brief outline of what the work entails. Once a prospect clicks on the post they are redirected to the initial source to read more and apply.

The idea behind these sites is fairly obvious and since their launch they have revolutionised the way in which internet users, not only look for work, but how they feel information should be presented and how easily accessible it should be.

Looking from a business perspective you can see the palpable benefits to hosting the majority of the work available in a particular country, it lessens the need to venture further afield and over time (as shown with the two aforementioned examples) it has increased both these boards market share significantly.

The job search engine model generates revenue in a similar way to the way in which search engines generate revenue and offer varying models;

Pay Per Click is fairly standard and allows Job Boards to out bid each other, either to be the top of the list for all of their advertised postings or for a specific niche.
Pay Per Conversion is another way in which some vertical search engines work and this relies on recording the number of click-throughs for a clients feed of roles, the client analysing with their own analytics to check what number have converted and then agreeing a price based on the results.
Sponsoring Vacancies, this model of revenue generation allows the end client to specify which postings they would like to promote, these sponsored vacancies sit above all others on the search results generating a greater click-through ratio than non-sponsored listings not dissimilar to adwords.

As the five year anniversary has recently passed for both Indeed and Simply Hired it is apparent that the job search engine has become a necessary part of the recruitment community and offers untold benefits to recruiters, direct employers and last but by no means least to jobseekers in their millions.

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