Free Job Posting Sites

Part 2:The Price Of "Free"

Free only applies to the cost of placing the posting. It does not include the time and energy required to track, follow, format and maintain the posting. Given the general technical level and capacities of most recruiters, an active customer support function is required to build any significant posting volume. Generally speaking, the price of the posting is not a significant issue for recruiters. What is significant is the value of their time. "Free" services simply aren't capitalized well enough to deliver full recruiter end automation

Since banner advertising (the only viable alternative to subscriptions or per posting charges) only generates $.05 per ad (at the most optimistic), a given ad would have to be viewed by over 200 job hunters to generate $10 in revenue. With any level of complexity and volume in the database, this is a very unlikely number. What is even more unlikely is the notion that such a service would have an adequate sales force with which to generate advertising revenue. If it was easy to get ad revenue, you'd see tons of banners on job sites.

The few ads that get that sort of traffic will eventually cause a shift in focus on the part of the "free" job hunting service (again, customer support of some kind is a must in the business). The result is that over time, the site will specialize in certain types of jobs. As their focus narrows, so will the traffic. In other words, the give-away model has a built in downward spiral. The operations will never be in the black.

So, any recruiter who depends on the "free service" vehicle assumes a great deal of risk. If they make any sort of internal commitment to using the service over time (internal posting mechanisms etc), all of that investment is at risk. In services where a fee is charged, the service provider bears all of the above risk, freeing the recruiter to shift his resources more spontaneously.

Initially, Yahoo seems like an exception. But, though their ads are free, most are posted from other services as a distribution vehicle. In that very particular case, the revenue generated from banner ads is marginal (in the sense that the business does not depend on the revenue and it costs little or nothing to generate) , most of the service function is handled as a part of someone else's fee structure and so on. Yahoo is a great deal for the customers of the services (fee based) who automatically post their jobs to Yahoo. Usenet works much the same way these days.

Using and choosing vendors depends on the vendor's ability to survive economically. Choosing a vendor because there is no charge for their services is the highest form of folly. While competitors build relationships with suppliers that have a meaningful chance of long term survival, Recruiters who depend on free services end up as technology gypsies...chasing the next freebie and squandering the time that could be applied to making more placements. The bottom line is that "free" is much more expensive in the medium and long term.