Soon to launch search.co.uk (
http://jobs.search.co.uk
) is touting itself as “a revolutionary new recruitment advertising site where you only pay for results”.
But is that really true?
I’m happy to be proved wrong of course, but looking at the blurb for employers, I’m not sure if there’s anything new or revolutionary about it, other than the pricing model of course. And that’s hardly revolutionary – there are any number of on/offline recruitment services available that have some form of response-based pricing/pricing-by-results model, and search.co.uk seems to borrow from those.
The way it works is this. I post my vacancy for free, and only pay for the applications I receive. A rate card cost of £15 per application for the first 10 applications, and £10 a go after that. They’ll even throw in a vacancy management system so I can easily post my jobs and an employer profile site. Which is good.
But it’s hardly revolutionary; it takes a pricing model used by employment agencies, paid for search, and even some recruitment advertising agencies (who offer a joined up attraction plus screening and selection service) and puts it into a jobs board setting.
Which is hardly surprising, given that search.co.uk is part of Search Consultancy, a recruitment solutions business that (according to its site) offers a range of recruitment advertising, response management, temp and perm agency services, volume resourcing and on-site/outsourced recruitment.
But if we leave its ownership to one side (as an advertiser I’m always initially sceptical of a jobs board that is part of a wider recruitment advertising/employment agency: can they be entirely independent of their owners or am I being asked to support my competitors, and pay for the privilege?), the problem with search.co.uk’s pricing model is all about timing.
After all, with official unemployment figures rising to 1.92m as at November (surely they must be well past the 2m mark by now?) there are record numbers of applicants for most roles, never mind that the quality is not necessarily there, and that is bound inflate the amount that employers using search.co.uk have to pay.
With search.co.uk, if I receive 10 applications for a role, I’ll pay £150. Which sounds reasonable. But if get 100 applicants (and let’s face it, lots of junior and middle tier roles are regularly attracting much higher levels of response), I’ll pay £1,050.
Which is a lot more than I would pay if I was using a carefully selected combination of existing job boards, paid for search or social media options.
Search.co.uk would claim to have thought about that. You can ‘cap’ your budget and limit the number of applicants. Which is OK, but as an employer you want to select the best candidates from the total number of applicants received, not stop taking applications at some arbitarily set limit. So it’s not an ideal solution.
But they do make a bold claim. “Guaranteed quality applications or you don’t pay”.
Well, that’s good. They’ve solved the quality issue. Until you learn that “quality applications” is defined as someone who has the right to live and work in the UK and lives within 40 miles of the job.
Which clearly won’t cut it for most employers.
Actually, on second thoughts, that makes me a qualified brain surgeon. Really, it’s true. I have the right to live and work in the UK and there are any number of hospitals within a 40 mile radius of where I live. My mum will be so proud …
The problem with a response-based pricing model of this type, is that somewhere along the line you are going to have to limit the number of applications you accept, or costs will run out of control. And if you limit the size of the pool you’re fishing from, it’s bound to limit the number of quality applicants in that pool.
Maybe at another time, in those halcyon, pre-credit crunch days when we were still talking about rising employment and ever more acute skills shortages, this kind of model would have worked. But in today’s high unemployment economy, getting the right balance between cost and the best candidates probably means sticking to the more established pricing models (including traditional job boards, social/professional networking sites and search).
As my wife is so fond of telling me, it’s all about timing.
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Great post Andrew, you hit the nail on the head. Im all for new and innovative ways to postion your offering but to be truelly innovative you need to create something the market wants and needs and right now this aint it. It’s simular to media bragging high levels of applications right now. Why? It means nothing. Good luck to Search.co.uk but I think they may just have turned up to the part a little to late.
Thanks Jamie. I agree – 2 years or go (or better still, 5 or 6) this would have been a great idea. But the market is more sophisticated now and events have in any case overtaken them.
Always good to read some coverage of our new site.
Just a couple of key points i felt needed clarifiying though.
- Firstly, we bought the site from Search Consultancy and Search.co.uk Ltd is now an indepedent online advertising business with Saints Capital Chamonix as the major shareholder. SC have maintained a minority share as they believe in the project.
- Secondly, we say ‘cap your applications’ because once you have received the first 20 you only pay for a future application that you physically ‘accept’ – so you can widen your pool of applicants but only pay for the ones you need, so more control.
- Thirdly, only paying for applicants within 40 miles is providing better ‘quality’ than any other job board! And, research suggests candidates who live more than 40 miles from the job location are highly unlikely to be placed, or stick it out if they do – so, why pay for their application!
- Finally, it is ‘revolutionary’ within the online recruitment sector in the regard that no other job board charges in this way. I totally accept that this charging model works in almost every other area of business, including PPC. So, why not online classified/recruitment advertising!? That is the whole point. No one has done it in this sector before. We didn’t claim we had invented the cure for the common cold!
As for ‘timing’ – well, time will tell!
If you have any more questions on our business model please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask – it’s always good to check before you make assumptions.
Thanks for the interest though.
Hi Peter
Thanks for your comments. And for clarifying a number of points.
With regards ownership, I take your comments onboard. However, can I draw your attention to your own intro pages, which clearly state that “we’re part of the same group as one of the UK’s biggest and most successful recruitment businesses”? (See under “Years of Experience” at http://jobs.search.co.uk/aboutSearch.aspx). As an independent online advertising business, this line might be a little misleading.
In terms of pricing, I think that setting the cap at 20 is, as I said on my blog, OK. It still means that for lots of vacancies employers will probably need to see more – the fact is that ‘quality applications’ (and I’m not just talking about the an applicants right to live and work in the UK, and where they live) is dropping proportionately, as the number of applicants go up (as a result of increasing unemployment).
And according to my maths, 20 applications will cost an employer £250 on your rate card (before they have accepted any additional CVs), which is still more than the standard posting rate card cost with some of the generic sites such as Jobsite and Fish4, and only a little less than the standard rate for S1Jobs (who are already seen as one of the strongest players with an established brand and audience in Scotland, where you will apparently be focussing initially).
But with your competitors, I get to see all the applications. Granted, I might have to work my way through a lot of applications that don’t meet my minimum requirements, but I also won’t have to pay more money for any more that do.
And those are my concerns with the model. Not whether or not it’s new or revolutionary (and who invented it), but whether employers will need to spend more (than they would otherwise would have to using established services) to get a viable shortlist of quality applicants, and if so, whether in the current market, they will do so.
Time, as you say, will tell. And regardless of the answer, I wish you every success. Regardless of whether it’s a brand new idea, revolutionary, used or borrowed, it’s refreshing to see an alternative to the established model. It has certainly fuelled some debate (between you and I, certainly!) and that can only be good for the business. I look forward to welcoming you into my offices soon to find out more.
Good luck.
[...] makes some very valid points about the “revolutionary” nature of their offer, or lack thereof. But my first glance concerns were slightly [...]
Thanks Jon. Interesting insights into the broader jobs board market. Good stuff.
I agree to get a job is really very tough task. gota solution but not more than expectation. thanks here i got some good stuff.
http://jobs-in-chandigarh.com/
thanks