Web 3.0 and Jobs: Overview

Jobs is one of the top online segments in the US with $5.9 billion online advertising revenues, which constitutes around 25% of Internet ad revenues in the US. The online job market has been steadily taking away market share from newspaper classifieds. In this series, we will evaluate the online jobs category against the Web 3.0 framework.

According to Hitwise “the market share of visits to the Business and Finance – Employment and Training category increased by 31 percent comparing the week ending January 6, 2007 versus the previous week, ending December 30, 2006.”

The top players in the online jobs market are CareerBuilder, Monster, Yahoo! HotJobs and vertical search engines like Indeed, Jobster and SimplyHired. According to Hitwise, CareerBuilder is the leading job site in terms of web visits with 13.73% visits, followed by Monster (11.51%) and Yahoo! Hot Jobs (5.33%).

Apart from searching for job, users visiting job sites read career related articles, share their work experiences, get their resumes done by experts, come to know about online courses, scholarships, career fairs, real estate, investments and taxes.

According to eMarketer, “there were 2.5 million new help wanted ads posted on job search sites or through online newspaper ads, up 28% from a year ago.” A typical visitor to a job site has a household income of over $60,000 per annum.

According to the comScore, sites dedicated to online career resources, job search, and training attracted an average of 53.3 million European visitors per month during Q1 2007, an increase of 3 percent versus a year ago and 8 percent versus Q4 2006. Monster with 8.3 million unique visitors in 1Q 2007 is the leading European job site.

Vertical job search engines have been witnessing the maximum year-on-year growth as job hunters have been searching for the job openings across the sites. Indeed is the most popular vertical job search engine.

According to Borrell and Associates smaller career-specific sites, as well as regional and community-based sites will grow faster than the plain vanilla job sites. Job sites offering online courses have led to a spurt among the younger lot, eager for a job before their graduation. Today the job sites are moving from being mass to niche. There has been a proliferation of specialized job sites, catering to professions like ER nursing, truck driving, etc. This has resulted in the popularity of sites like SnagAJob, CoolWorks, and vertical job search engine WetFeet.

SnagAJob lists only hourly and part-time jobs, so, if you’re not looking for a full-time job, it’s an excellent site to use for job searching. CoolWorks lists thousands of summer and seasonal jobs. WetFeet is an internship search engine.

Most of these job sites have very good contextual content. The sites furnish information on available opportunities, hottest recruiters, recommended openings, models for covering letter, tools for contextual searching (by location, category, salary or level of experience), job alerts through e-mail, etc. Yahoo! Hot Jobs along with Yahoo! Answers has developed a forum for job seekers to post their questions and get replies from other users. Monster allows users to upload up to five different resumes, while SimplyHired enables you to post your resume on 80 job boards.

Job sites earn money through ad revenues, subscription fee for Pro accounts, commissions from employers who post jobs, paid services like customized resume or multiple apply options, etc. This apart, sites like CareerBuilder have partnered with shopLocal to retail products like laptops, digital cameras, iPods, etc.

The recent boom in the online job industry has also seen a series of M&A deals. Microsoft has bought a 4% stake in CareerBuilder and the two have entered a multi-year deal through 2013. CareerBuilder will be paying an estimated $443 million to MSN for generating traffic for the job site. Dice.com acquired two UK based job sites, efinancialGroup and jobsinthemoney.com in November, 2006. The two sites were job search engines for jobs in investment banking, accounting, retail banking, and wealth management industries.

Some of the job sites are funded by old media companies. Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy are the original promoters of CareerBuilder. Indeed is funded by NYT. Simply Hired recently raised $13.5 million from NewsCorp.

In 2006, Monster signed up with Akron Beacon Journal, to empower the career section of the daily’s website Ohio.com, replacing its near competitor CareerBuilder. Google is rumored to be in talks to acquire SimplyHired.

With the penetration of the Internet, the online job market is becoming increasingly popular. A study by Borrell Associates shows that online ad spending on job sites have grown three times over from $1.5 billion in 2004 to $3.5 billion in 2006. According to MediaPost Publications, online job sites will grab 20% of the revenue share from newspaper recruitment ads.

The online job market is going to see increased M&A activity from the major Internet companies like Yahoo, Google and MSN and other media companies especially the struggling newspaper companies, who are looking at ways to increase their online presence.