Workhound.co.uk is heading to Austin, Texas in March for the South By Southwest Interactive and Music Festival (SXSW Interactive), as part of the UK’s Digital Mission.
Workhound was the only recruitment company selected as one of 35 of the UK’s hottest digital SMEs invited to participate in the Trade Mission.
The trade mission is sponsored by UK Trade & Investment and organised by Chinwag.
Workhound, the UK’s largest job search engine, will be introducing it’s latest product at the event, as part of their global launch of their new social media search engine product.
At Workhound, our mission is to organize the world’s online recruitment data. We are tracking the pronounced shift towards social media. New platforms are emerging (e.g. facebook and twitter) and we’re building semantic tools to make sense of the data found on them. We have several new products that we will be introducing over the next 2 months to address this shift.
In the meantime, we have built a global directory of twitter job feeds. But we didn’t want to just build any directory. Most Twitter job feeds are just not very useful and many of them are downright disruptive to the Twitter experience. Feeds that we will include follow this guideline:
The Workhound Job Feed Manifesto:
Be kind: no more than one job post every hour.
Be useful: include relevant info like Job Title, Location, Salary and URL.
Be smart: have a niche and use relevant #tags. (eg Media jobs in Tashkent)
Above all don’t be Twevil.
If you have suggestions on how to improve the directory or know of other great feeds please let us know in the comments or via twitter @workhound
Giles Guest of Enhance Media nicely teed up a Long Tail framework for thinking about recruitment.  Here are some of my quick thoughts on how they might apply specifically to the recruitment advertising market. The Long Tail can be a problematic framework for setting corporate strategy but it provides a useful heuristic for looking at markets.
Quickly, in music and movies, it was thought that they only way to make money at entertainment retail was to focus on the hits. Blockbuster and HMV would set aside disproportionate floor space, and marketing spend to focus on merchandising their top 25 titles. The insight of Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail, is that with eCommerce platforms, the cost of holding, storing, and distributing media drops, the potential audience is widened, and tools for finding and discovering less popular titles means that there might be more money to make from the millions of unpopular titles than the hundreds of popular ones. This notion is often debated (Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School takes it on here Should You Invest in the Long Tail? For those who enjoy this stuff, I offer a rebuttal here.)Â
To simplify, let’s try and isolate the Social Media (twitter, facebook, ning, linkedin) impact.
This is how I like think about the UK recruitment marketplace. There are 30mm individuals in the workforce. 2.5mm registered companies. Social media provides an easy and free publishing and distribution platform with tremendous reach. This could put some downward pricing pressure on the cost of posting a job.
But, since social media is reliant upon the social graphs of its participants. My belief is that for easy to fill positions, social media could pose a real threat to job sites but for other posts the social graph will be too limited and the reach of job sites will be required.
But the social graph isn’t the only limiting factor for platforms like Twitter to play a role in recruitment. At present, search tools are not sophisticated enough to make social networks usable platforms for finding employment. Hashtags and status-update search tools aren’t sufficient. As part of our mission to make sense of the world’s recruitment data, we’re building tools to mine this data.
Some quick thoughts on the really quite good - Enhance Media’s Online Recruitment - 2009 - The Year Ahead Conference.
Great turnout. With bad news aplenty in the industry, it’s nice to be reminded that online recruitment advertising remains a massive opportunity (we still think at least £200+mm in the UK) with many smart people involved. Companies are still recruiting, but to a lesser degree, and there is greater pressure on them to be accountable and to improve ROI with their recruitment spend. When top line revenue growth is threatened, the companies that succeed will find ways to increase operating margins. Per the talks:
Luisa Mauro - YouTube: Agree with her that YouTube is big. Agree that video shows promise and would be interested in seeing more examples of recruiters and HR managers making use of video. Using video for Ads (personal or corporate) is fun and is a natural progression, but I’m sure there are more interesting ways to make use of video in the recruitment sector and we’d be interested in working with companies that are developing new tech/approaches to video.
Simon Appleton & Tony Jewell - Workcircle: Enjoyed their talk. I like the case study model of presenting and they effectively laid out their approach to traffic acquisition is a useful manner. Although at a certain level, all online businesses are arbitrage plays, Workcircle offers a great value proposition and is more explicitly a lead acquisition arbitrage play. Asymmetrical information is a great advantage in these situations, but platforms like Adwords provide a degree of transparency that will force Workcircle to work harder and harder to maintain their advantage but I’m sure they’ll find a way.
Jeremy Mason - Revenue Science: I’ve always been a fan of behavioral tracking but with more and more performance based media available, I’ve made less use of it than I have in the past. With CPM buys it’s critical, but for advertisers on CPC/CPA campaigns, not so much. For publishers trying to push up their effective CPMs, we’ll see more and more of it. Would like to have had his talk more focused on behavioral targeting centered in the recruitment space. I’m sure from opposition research, to talent poaching, to better understanding the passive job seeker, that there is some great data and case studies they could present.
Giles Guest - Enhance Media: Admire his bravery in talking about the future in such a turbulent time. Also, thought it brave to offer definitive definitions for Web 1-3.0 when even the developers of the technologies that enable these shifts don’t have clear definitions for them. Not sure the analog (Rolling Stones 1-3.0) really helped. How Rolling Stones 3.0 meshes with the semantic web isn’t abundantly clear especially in the framework of the four dimensions that he put forward. Thought his talk was best when focused on how he has effectively used new technologies in the recruitment space. Not sure on the theory of changing the recruitment process from reactive to proactive. Think there just might be too much “noise” and “fuzziness” in the data to develop technologies that would enable this. He’s clearly a bright guy and we would be interested in hearing this hypothesis laid out in more detail. The Long Tail is also a tricky framework to present a value chain analysis. We also welcome more discussion on how aggregators impact the value chain in recruitment.
Josh Smith - Facebook: I like the Facebook ad platform. Would like to see more of the media buyer tools that AdWords has, but for demo/behavioral targeting on a CPC basis it’s tough to beat. Good presenter.
Tim Forster - PWC: Real world examples are useful and this was a nice case study of how PWC got into the blog business. Good extemporaneous speaker which was useful since he’s probably not the closest individual in the organization to the management of their blog efforts. Difficult to assess the success of their efforts or even just how to benchmark the ROI. Would be interested in learning about their metrics for success even if it’s just a brand building exercise. Amused when he suggested that poaching of their personnel was, not so unwelcome, in this environment.
Janet Berry - Bracknell Forest Council: Like her no nonsense, brass tacks approach to their recruitment efforts. Also, that she was open about challenges to their efforts whether they were IT, institutional, or even generational (amusing to learn that their Facebook campaigns have to be managed remotely since workplace facebooking is not allowed and about how tetchy those Gen X folks can be). Good to see that they’re still recruiting and that even though they’ve reduced their recruitment budget by 40% that they are looking not, at just reducing their efforts, but at being smarter in how they allocate their spend.
Dr. Steven Finch - Daxtra: Although, this was the talk I was most interested in (I’m kind of a data nut), the notion that it’s difficult to glean knowledge from data is fairly well known. Would like to have seen more of a tie in to the recruitment space and think that the talk could have been better tailored to the audience.
All in all, though a great day. Thanks, Enhance Media.
Om Malik is an excellent tech reporter who used some clever HR forensics to sniff out that Hulu might be opening its content internationally (a quite exciting scoop, especially for those who prefer not to spoof). He saw that they were hiring internationally, looked at the job specs, and concluded that this indicated that Hulu was going international. Smart.
In similar fashion, while conversing about who was taking tenancy in the new Westfield London mall, I took a look at their website which was, typically, coy about their new leaseholders (many landlords like to keep this info on the DL). But, since staffing is a critical path item, many retailers have already started the recruitment process and with a couple quick searches on a job search engine like, say, Workhound, it was easy to compile a list of the new tenants.
Good search engines take unstructured data by the terabyte and structure it. Which, in our case, can help those looking for a job, trying to benchmark their salary, or even just gathering some business intelligence.
A couple of quick announcements. We have put up our DreamJobAlert.co.uk and would appreciate any feedback on it before we start to promote it. It allows individuals to give us the search criteria for their dream job (salary, title, location, industry, perks, etc) and every day we search the web to find it.
We also just started our featured jobs program. Contact Henry@workdigital.co.uk for more info. Speaking of Henry, our marketing manager is off to Australia for a couple of weeks in January having won the STA Travel video contest. See his entry - southozstars.com.
As a company we track real-time recruitment advertising which it believes is a strong indicator of future job growth and for changes in the rate of unemployment. Unfortunately, this data is showing that unemployment will trend negatively for the next several months.
Some general “new job creation” trend data that WorkHound.co.uk has data-mined tracking directional changes over last 12 months:
MORTGAGE ADVISOR:Â jobs decreased by 59% COFFEE: jobs decreased by 36% ADVERTISING: jobs decreased by 19% PROPERTY: jobs decreased by 17%
while…
PILATES Instructors: increased by 328% Marketing with Facebook Experience Jobs: increased by 154% LEGAL: increased by 22%
A Video of our Weekly Good News in the UK Job Report is here.
Google Flu Trends offers a fascinating look at how search engines can replace traditional models for data acquisition to great effect. When google took search requests of flu symptoms by region and mapped them to CDC data, they indicated that at much greater speed and lower cost they could collect epidemiological info the closely correlates with CDC reports. The assumption was that individuals were probably googling flu symptoms since a family member was presenting them.
In an earlier post, we looked at how companies could use our job search engine to gather competitive intelligence. Likewise, at WorkHound we track how many new jobs are created daily. In an era when guessing the direction of unemployment data is darn important, we believe that our real-time tracking of new job creation could be a strong leading indicator for future unemployment numbers. Unfortunately, this data is showing that unemployment will trend negatively for the next several months.
For the last 18 months we’ve been seeing about 35k new jobs being created daily and this kept the unemployment number fairly flat. New jobs created were being equally offset by jobs that were being eliminated. In the last month, this number has fallen nearly in half. We are now seeing 21.5k jobs created daily. Coupled with more job cuts, new job creation is falling well behind job elimination and will lead to higher unemployment.
The good news, though, is that new jobs are being created daily and there are better tools by which to find them. Some general “new job creation” trend data that we’ve data-mined tracking directional changes over last 12 months:
MORTGAGE ADVISOR:Â jobs decreased by 59% COFFEE: jobs decreased by 39% ADVERTISING: jobs decreased by 25% PROPERTY: jobs decreased by 23%
while…
PILATES Instructors: increased by 57% Marketing with Facebook Experience Jobs: increased by 24% LEGAL: increased by 22%
Granted, the increase demand for pilates instructors won’t offset job losses by estate agents, but flexibility might just be the ticket to get through this crunch period.
Low cost providers do well in market downturns. McDonalds and Wal-Mart both posted topline growth in October. This demonstrates that the right market positioning (”Dollar Menus” and “Every day low prices”) can permit a company to make share of wallet gains in very competitive markets. In this environment, Value is the key USP. For recruitment advertising, though, how do companies establish ROI (cost per qualified candidate, cost per fill, cost per visitor, etc.) and how should job sites position themselves?
It’s not clear to me that job sites and recruiters have a standard metric that can be reverse engineered to create a common benchmark for publishers/recruiters/boards to position against, but this may just be the inherent nature of the category. Since online media, when bought and tracked smartly, is so accountable, some common metrics and benchmarks would be eminently useful.
There seems to be a broad macroeconomic consensus, that the deleveraging of carry trades, the tightening in credit markets, and the revaluing of broad basket of assets, will depress economic growth for the next several quarters. This speculation seems to be on solid footing and individuals/orgs like Fred Wilson, Jason Calacanis, and Sequoia have offered thoughts on the shifting economic landscape and how start-ups need to manage the downturn.
The advice given by Calacanis and Wilson on how to adjust a business in light of a downturn, I believe is just good advice for managing a start-up in any climate. (Frankly, for start-ups, it’s pretty much always nuclear winter - very few companies get funded and more companies go in to receivership or simply fold than onto a positive liquidity event).
In recruitment advertising, offline still sucks up at least half the revenues. They offer very little accountability, declining applicant volume, and high CPMs. They have strong brands which co’s might feel that there’s some transference through associating with (as advertised in the Financial Times) and some qualifying of leads (readers of CDS Swap Weekly are a self-selecting bunch). But, offline has the tougher case to make in a tougher economic environment, hence the recent wave of layoffs.
What’s important to remember, though, is that big market opportunities even with some contraction remain massive opportunities and recruitment is one such opportunity. Global recruitment in 2007 was nearly a $100 billion opportunity, in 09 even if topline drops 20% there’s still a lot of money to be made. The key is understanding how a contracting market alters the behavior of the key players. Wilson, in his piece, offers advice targeted for for advertising driven internet plays that is spot on for the online recruitment space. He notes that in past recessions, that media buyers have sought more accountability and been more focused on ROI.
It is for this reason, that Google had a great quarter while the NY Times is pushing towards junk status and its CEO is flying coach (a fun data point is the contribution to EBIT from about.com for NYTimes).
My belief is that even when global economic growth recovers, that there is enough inefficiency in the recruitment space that profits can increase but topline revenue will remain essentially flat. There is still a massive global competition to attract talent.
Online recruitment sites have an expense in drawing traffic and then have a path to make money from it. Whether unemployment rates go up (seems likely in the US and UK in Q4), or individuals are slightly more insecure about their current jobs, the demand for recruitment sites will increase which will take down traffic acquisition costs.
SocNets, blogs, and other non-recruitment focused sites will grab some recruitment advertising since their low cost of traffic and increasing ability to target advertising allows them to be a low cost provider but will be challenged to provide scale and quality leads.
Job boards will see their cost of traffic drop but will see pricing and accountability pressure from media buyers. Being able to provide more quality leads through superior screening/targeting will allow them to maintain a slight price premium.
As a job search engine, we are seeing, especially in the UK, a sharp drop in newly advertised jobs (down 27% in the last 2 months) and a sharp uptick in traffic. Job sites if positioned well, can be solid negative beta plays if they can manage to contain costs and grow their margins. This positioning will also serve them well when the business cycle inevitably turns favorable once again.
Jason Calacanis is the CEO of Mahalo, a human powered search engine, and an industry veteran who is a true entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. In his most recent newsletter - The Startup Depression, he looks at the larger macro-economic climate and suggests that for start-ups this will likely be a trying period and he puts forward some sound ideas for how to weather the storm.
We agree that in this environment, startups need to focus on building revenue while containing costs, but we also think that these transitional periods create real opportunities.
We track UK online recruitment ad inventory very carefully and we’ve seen about a 15% drop in the last 60-days. Since recruitment advertising is migrating to the internet at a quick clip, this does not portend well for print publications that rely upon classified ads. As Mark Sweney points out in the Guardian,
“Regional newspaper publisher Johnston Press, which has taken a battering due to its exposure to freefalling ad sectors such as recruitment and property, has been under the eye of analysts.”
Newspapers have high fixed costs and thin operating margins. These conditions make revenue downturns dangerous. Likewise, a downturn in asset values and revenue is wreaking havoc at the highly levered, high fixed cost, investment banks.
Yet, the core business for banks and media co’s still represents a massive opportunity. It will just shift to more accountable/nimble/cash efficient enterprises - boutique i-banks, hedge funds, search engines etc. We believe that even if there is a temporary decline in topline revenue in these sectors, smart operators will find a way to grab higher profits and create real wealth.
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve closed our Series A round of funding with a terrific media partner. This will allow us to invest more in the development of our job search engine, salary calculator, advertising platform, mobile and other job search services. More details and a link to the release here in the media journal paidContent.
New power rankings have been released for HR related blogs and The Recruiter’s Lounge ended up on top. The list of finalists provides a great resource for keeping on top of the latest trends in recruitment.
Having authored some patent applications in the US around business processes for internet commerce, I was always a little bothered by the practice. A quite good patent law blog has a solid write-up on how the US Patent and Trademark Office is looking at the appropriate scope for providing patents in the area of business process. Although it’s not quite written for a lay audience, it’s relatively accessible.
Although in traditional business channels, there are a myriad of ways to put up protective walls to impede competition, it’s more difficult to do so on the Net. Just have to build better products.
Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School has completed a new look at consumer data to write a piece entitled Should You Invest in the Long Tail? Her article seems to be written as a corrective to some of the hoopla around Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail. Her article is worth reading but mainly for the quality of her research. The analysis, however, struck me as often wrong-headed and fairly first level.
When looking at consumer research, what I find interesting are non-intuitive, actionable insights. Elberse’s discovery that, as she modestly states, “may be of intellectual interest to readers,” that there’s money to be made in blockbusters is neither. A record executive that states “if we just had more platinum records, we’d make more money,” would not be applauded for strategic vision.Â
I found the tone of the piece somewhat arch as if Elberse felt it necessary to provide a necessary tonic to the success of Anderson’s book. There’s a hint of straw man building when she suggests “…that it would be imprudent for companies to upend traditional practice and focus on the demand for obscure products.” As if, a Blockbuster executive might put forward the shifting the product off the new release wall and replacing it with the French New Wave.
To look at the Rhapsody data and to come away with the insight that the music that is most popular to music consumers is also of most interest to Rhapsody customers is not that interesting.
That, as Anderson puts in his ratherpolite response, Rhapsody gets 68% of its demand from titles that are not available in traditional retail stores, is the type of insight could really upend the entertainment media value chain. Even limited just to the arena of producing more blockbusters, if companies can monetize inventory they had previously written off and find more ways make profits on titles that fail to appeal to a larger audience, they can afford to make more bets and increase their odds of having more blockbusters in their portfolio.
The notion that entertainment co’s might be able rethink their portfolio strategy seems much more useful than Elberse’s advice that “When producing niche goods for the tail end of the distribution, keep costs as low as possible.”
One of the key tenets of the Long Tail was that new modes of distribution were causing a regression towards zero in inventory carrying and transactional costs. This is why a company like Netflix (NFLX trades at 3x BBI) can have an inventory position vastly superior to a regular video store. Elberse’s advice that retailers need to “Strictly manage the costs of offering products that will rarely sell,” especially given to retailers who traditionally have operating margins close to 3% and are already very cost focused just doesn’t seem that useful.
In a final dig, noting the delicious irony that Anderson’s ideas were contained in a bestseller, she again (just as her Rhapsody and Quickflix data seem to reinforce Anderson’s thesis) states the obvious and inadvertently makes Anderson’s point. Publishers were willing to make a surprisingly large bet on a book with a few too many mentions of Power Laws to generally attract a large audience. In making a large bet, Hyperion signaled their awareness that bestsellers can make money and in Anderson’s case, maybe they took to heart that with new potential audiences for niche content, they had a hedge that allowed them to make the “jaw dropping” offer and subsequently win the bidding war and make a decent return.
As it pertains to recruitment advertising, our Workhound and SalaryTrack sites benefit from investments in data procurement and processing. A key proposition for is that we provide substantial market coverage and that our data is of sufficient quality and quantity to be useful. Much of our investment is in processing data records that are found in the Tail of the distribution curve and our users find great value in it.
It’s being floated that Microsoft is set to acquire Powersetfor£50 million. By adding to their capabilities in turning unstructured data into structured data using better semantic search capabilities, it is hoped that they can improve their search engine results and maybe ad serving tech. More thoughts on Semantic Search here.
Taking a look at the new GoogleAdPlanner. Seems like a nice vehicle for sourcing new inventory for ad buys and for provding rudimentary campaign management tools. Be interesting to see how it might level CPMs for smaller publishers. Not quite sure it will have the qualitative data we need for our buys but we have applied to beta test it and will keep you posted.
When Microsoft was being hounded by the DOJ on antitrust issues, Bill Gates continued to put forward, with some audacity, his company’s mission “to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home.” Â This signaled to software buyers that MSFT was intent on maintaining their OS as the standard and, to employees, it made clear what their mission was.
Even though the DOJ could have posed a near existential threat, and even though their stated commitment to gaining market share might antagonize the DOJ, MSFT didn’t lose focus. It realized that they couldn’t contol what the DOJ was going to do. They hired attorneys, stepped up their lobbying efforts, but, most importantly, concentrated on building their business.
One can’t help but feel that Yahoo couldn’t use a little of this focus and bravado. With their posturing on the MSFT offer, their quite personal responses to Icahn, and their current management exodus (although, to be fair, I haven’t seen good data on whether or not the senior management attrition rate has spiked or is just getting more attention), they still have a terrific business that kicks off nearly $1 billion in free cash flow.
As one reads this blog, there are hundreds of analysts modeling new futures for YHOO. YHOO can spend spend their human capital anticipating and responding to them, and they should have a small team dedicated to this, but other operating units need to stick to their coding. Â YHOO can’t control Icahn nor the emergence of new Icahns. If it’s decided that it’s in the shareholders best interest to athwart his takeover bid, then retain counsel, put in poison pill and other defenses and, most importantly, just focus on how to continue to build and monetize great products.
Wm
Danny Sullivan of the search engine land site does a nice job of parsing May search data here. His analysis nets out that in several cuts of the data, Google is continuing to dominate the search business. There is much speculation about whether threats to Google’s dominant market position will bubble up or be met head on.
Our inclination is that it will be a combination of shifting internet usage patterns and a shifting in the notion of what constitutes search. And we’ve always maintained that Google’s utility in some of the verticals that generate large cash flows is not great. In travel, classifieds, and services, Google does not offer a great user experience for either the advertiser or information seeker. Read Write Web, has an interesting piece looking at 11 search trends that may disrupt Google. In general they are arguing that some of the areas that Google is dominant are very expensive areas to compete in and just not meaningful to end users. We agree.
It’s certainly possible the YHOO made the right decision with regards to their newlyannouncedGoogledeal. They’re smart folks who obviously have deep domain knowledge of their business. Of concern, though, is that this is a tactical but not strategic move. If they were punting on search because they couldn’t match GOOGs ability to capture/structure data that could be a fair concession — they’ve outsourced search tech since the beginning (recall Inktomi et alia).
But, as a content + services company, that relies on monetization, punting to temporarily gain higher CPMs seems like it could hurt them to the core. Offline metaphors are dangerous since the web really is different. But, if News Corp [NWS] through its sales channel and ad inventory position could get higher effective rates than Viacom [VIA], should VIA offer up its inventory? Doesn’t this continue to weaken VIAs relative position? The web isn’t a zero-sum game, YHOOs inventory position is variable, taking more revenue with higher CPMs allows YHOO to invest in other aspects of their business — these elements could make a collection of tactics add up to a successful strategy.
But I think this will undermine their overall advertising position since many of the dynamics that made it difficult for them to compete in search advertising will continue to make it difficult for them in display advertising. There are differences between search and display. But the factors that contribute to GOOGs ability to achieve higher CPMs for search (massive base of advertisers, great contextual ad serving, good campaign management tools) will be utilized to build their display business. My concern is that the millions of businesses that might have used Panama for search and could be upsold into display will just focus on Adwords and, to use a hackneyed expression - sometimes companies move the piano bench when it’s the piano that needs to get moved.
look at their 
a positive liquidity event).
some sound ideas for how to weather the storm.
with a terrific 
business process. Although it’s not quite written for a lay audience, it’s relatively accessible.
