Why are Job Sites so Expensive?

16th Jan 2007

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It's always baffled me why a job site can charge several hundred pounds for putting a vacancy online whereas eBay can do something far more complicated for a few pence. Well, actually, it's reasonably clear - greed. Anyone who has ever had to deal with recruitment either as an employer or a potential employee will realise there is a whole industry out there dedicated to extracting as much money as possible from companies in order to bring employers and staff together. Traditionally this role was taken by recruitment agencies who actually had to work for their money, both in terms of finding the business and doing the rather hard job of finding the right potential candidates for the roles. So, along come recruitment websites which, potentially, have the ability to do all the matching work and the advertising in an automated way - at a nominal cost. So, why is it fair to charge three-figure sums for this?

Some would say its more fair to recruitment agencies this way, to stop them being priced out of the market. It's true, recruitment agencies have a love-hate relationship with job board websites - they may be competition but it also helps them do their job of promoting their vacancies and getting candidate very much easier than before.

So, I started looking at the possibility of a more fair way to advertise jobs for both recruiters and direct employers. My first thought was simply to charge $1 per vacancy advert - something cheap and reasonable which would easily cover the costs of delivering the advert. But later, I began to think that the really clever option would be to allow job posting for free. Advertising models, such as Google's AdWords (as shown here), have been tremendously effective in turning page views into cash. It would be possible to offer a fully-featured and unrestricted recruitment site without needing to worry about payment systems or chasing invoices. I like that kind of idea.

My next thought was not to produce one job site, but to produce many - the reason being is that a small local site can be more effective than a larger regional or national site. Further thinking developed a model for a hierarchical layout of sites so that we have a national site (for example the Canada job site, at the top), a regional site (such as the Ontario job site) underneath, a city site (Toronto) underneath that, and then a specialist site (IT jobs in Toronto) underneath that. A candidate that registers on one of the sites can access all of them, and a job that is registered, for example, in the Toronto city site will also automatically appear on the Canada and Ontario sites. If it happens to be an IT job, it will also automatically appear on the Toronto IT Jobs site.

So, we did just that. We set up All World Jobs, and used it to set up over 130 free job sites worldwide. My Dad and my Brother joined up with me to help develop and run this, leaving me more free time to do my day job (Mysterious Ways!). Now they have an engine (which I have developed entirely from scratch, it doesn't use any of the code on previous job sites that I have worked on) which allows them to build these sites easily - but each one can grow and develop with its own identity and community of employers, recruiters and potential candidates.

So far we have launched sites in the following areas: The USA - We have a site for every state (unless we've forgotten one!) so, for example, if you are hunting for jobs in New Mexico you know where to click!, similarly, we have sites for jobs in New Hampshire, and Arizona jobs. There are similar sites for every state, and for the major cities, so we have a site for jobs in New York City which is structured underneath the site we have for jobs in New York State.

Possibly the most important region for us in the future will be China - We have already got great experience with Chinese websites, and we are probably the UK's leading experts on Chinese website localization, development and promotion. So it wasn't very difficult for us to do a website for mainland China jobs too (we also have a site for jobs in Hong Kong as that's a very different market - this site is done in English as many of the vacancies, especially the financial positions advertised overseas, are advertised and promoted in English. In the future we will expand this site to include a traditional Chinese element. Of course, the mainland China site is entirely in Simplified Chinese text. It also shows another huge benefit of our business model - we don't have to worry about getting money out of China because we're not needing to be paid by the Chinese businesses who want to promote their jobs. Life is so much simpler with an advertising-based model!

The other territories we are doing include a site for jobs in India - which we are convinced may be as big, if not bigger, than China. It also has the advantage of being in the English language. We're also covering jobs in the middle east as there is a huge demand for foreign labour in this area, especially in the Gulf.

As I mentioned previously, we have also built a range of sites for Canada. We even have sites for out-of-the-way places such as sites for Yukon jobs and even jobs in Yellowknife. Running these as a commercial venture based on job sales would be a total waste of time. But the free model helps us to build sites that can become genuinely useful for local communities - Small "mom and pop" businesses can afford to advertise for out-of-town workers who might fancy a relatively stress-free life in the Canadian outback. We're going to be growing these sites both in quality and features and in number, with new sites being added to our portfolio every week. If you're impressed with what we're doing then why not use our sites next time you need to advertise a vacancy. It's free - you have nothing to lose!

And if you're thinking this seems like a great business that will grow in the future and are interested in joint ventures, investment (or maybe you're one of our competitors who'd like to pay us a lot of money to stop!) then please contact us using the Mysterious Ways contact form.

Jolyon