matt marshall, charlene lie and others have all talked about the implications of hotjobs scraping and presenting job listings from other sites. thought i'd add my own perspective having spent many months analyzing this market opportunity for tribe. (btw, matt is becoming quite the blogger celeb in his own right with his recent wsj story. congrats to him.)
firstly, it is somewhat comforting to see the world actually move in this web 2.0 way when we've all been predicting it:) beyond ego gratification (which doesnt pay any bills), here's a few thoughts...
- what drives audience? i've never seen any proof that most comprehensive is a key driver for jobs or dates. in all our focus group studies at tribe we never found this to be true. popularity of sites like craigslist for jobs and jdate for dates proves opposite.
- people want to connect with people - job seekers have always told me they use CL because they can get to the actual hiring manager (via email) and avoid recruiters and hr people. this makes me think the winning site will have a perception of connecting people more directly.
- what drives listers? every job lister on craigslist will tell you, 'omg, i got 10 responses in the first hour'. they do seem to care more about the immediate gratification. from this perspective aggregation is a good thing in driving more widespread viewing and responding.
- its all about brand - i believe the reason monster and careerbuilder can persist and charge such high prices is that they have brands. brands take a really long time to build in classifieds where your audience may show up once a year or once ever. for this reason, i dont see any scenario where the aggregators win on better mousetraps. my bet is on craigslist, monster, careerbuilder and of course tribe:)
Marc - I agree with some of your points, but disagree with your notion that comprehensiveness doesn't matter for job search. We have found comprehensiveness to be a critical factor in user satisfaction. Since Indeed launched in November last year, we have been deluged by feedback from job seekers saying they love the fact that they can access jobs from all their favorite sources in one search.
Paul Forster
http://www.indeed.com
Posted by: Paul Forster | July 19, 2005 at 01:13 PM