Vertical Search Can Win

Joel Cheesman is at it again, bless ‘im! In response to what he believes is an erroneous prediction by Peter Weddle, Joel loads both barrels and goes for broke.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with Joel’s analysis. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, as I have written about it here and here. I haven’t seen or read anything to change my opinion.

I have always maintained that if vertical search went the path of FlipDog they would be marginalized by Google and eventually die. I believe in and support companies like SimplyHired because I believe they have a compelling case around passive candidate acquisition and monetization.

Some of the pieces of that case have been laid out in Joel’s great article and the thoughtful comments from Dave, Peter, etc. However, I believe that there is a critical bit that is missed.

Let’s think of the “passive candidate” market in Geoffrey Moore terms. The vendors (vertical search companies) are approaching this market with a product (search, content and tools, but more heavily weighted to search) that they want the market to buy. In this case, the customer is “buying” with their time and clicks, not with their money, but since by definition passive candidates feel that spending time on searching for a job is a waste, getting these customers to spend this precious commodity is every bit as difficult as getting your grandmother to spend money on a video game.

Classic marketing models say that you want to get the “early adopters” to engage and then continue to provide value and momentum to cross over to a larger buying population. In terms of vertical search, there are two critical inflection points: getting the passive candidate to show up in the first place and getting them to return.

Let’s take the second inflection point first. Getting a passive candidate to return is about the value of the previous interactions. We can safely assume that content and tools that passive seekers find relevant will cause them to return. I’ll leave it to the respective competitors to hash out exactly what content and tools will create that flow. Suffice it to say that this is not an impossible problem to solve given the right talent and capitalization.

The first inflection point is far harder. Like Peter points out in his comments on Joel’s article, most passive candidates (again, by definition) not only aren’t looking for a job they really don’t want to look for a job. So what could cause passive candidate’s to cross that emotional chasm?

Although SimplyHired has been conspicuously quiet on this issue, I think they are showing their hand early and may have the answer: vertical search, but even more so. With their “Working Mothers” and “Dogster” deals SimplyHired is saying the following to passive job seekers “Love your job, but love your (fill in the blank) more?” In other words, what would cause a passive candidate to engage a vertical search engine for the first time even though said candidate doesn't want another job and even experiences emotional discomfort doing so? The visceral pull of something that is more important to the passive candidate than their job: their kids, their dog, quality time with fellow UFO believers... you name it. All of us have  something more important to us than our present jobs, and if I can find a new job that will help me spend more time with that person, place or thing, then it will probably be worth spending time  discovering the possibilities, no matter how much I like my present job.

 This may be in fact be the lever needed to pry the vaunted passive candidates from their comfortable nests. I understand the point of view that community is the path to the ultimate destination, but I can’t say that I agree. The same emotional and time constraints that prevent passive candidates (isn’t that an oxymoron?) from engaging in a job search are likely to deter those same candidates from engaging in a community of similarly minded “non-seekers.” If someone isn’t looking for a job then the communities they tend to want to engage in center around other people who can provide value to their present engagement. I just don’t see that sentiment translating into a cool monetization angle. Although as someone who actually spends money on trying to gain access Mr. and Ms. Passive I would be more than happy to be proved wrong.

Of course (as I have said many times before) only time will tell. But until someone convinces me otherwise, I am going to be placing my bets with the “technology” more than the “community.”

Comments

[Joel]

Well put.

[Colin Kingsbury]

Jeff,

Some good thoughts here but I'm going to ask a few Devil's Advocate questions:

1. If "amenity-filtering" like dog-friendly becomes popular, what prevents Monster from offering it? Their marketing budget is a lot larger and can put a lot more money in affiliate pockets.

2. After dogs and working mothers, how much deeper does the well of "specialty" categories go? My suspicion is that while there are a lot more pools out there, they quickly get a lot smaller, which raises a lot of complications. For instance, I'm a pilot, and I'd be a lot more interested in an employer who allowed me to fly my plane on business when appropriate- many companies' risk management policies don't allow it. There are perhaps 100,000 active pilots in the US for whom this might be a real draw, which means at any time you're talking to perhaps 10-15,000 people, which seems to me like too small a population to merit much attention. Part of the point here is that a lot of the potential categories require serious cultural and policy changes to reach out to. This seems like a long tail play, and for a lot of companies, covering all but one or two spots on that long tail isn't going to be cost-effective, and the secret of long tail businesses is they figure out how to cover all or most of the spots cheaply.

3. How do the vertical engines figure out who offers which "amenity" benefits? My sense is that in order to be effective this would require direct contact with the employer, which puts them in a mindshare game with the fee boards.

I think you're dead-on that unless the verticals do some kind of category-changing, they're bound to get swamped by the 800lb gorillas in Round 2. I'm just not sure whether the pitch you describe above is a real category-changer.

[Marc Drees]

Job boards and vertical search engines in the traditional space will always be ill-equipped to attract passive candidates. Simply because they have nothing to offer. The core experience is invariably poor and relevant content is just not there. It seems a very naïve thought to expect deals like SimplyHired-Dogster will have any serious impact beyond a couple of dog fanatics.

I visit Amazon on a very regular basis. Why? Because it provides me with an excellent experience when I’m actively looking, and I just like to visit from time to time to browse, find interesting new books/CD’s or just kill some time.

Likewise, over time I will change between active and passive jobseeker states. But the job board and vertical search engine experience is so extremely poor that I will never visit a job board when in passive mode. That will only change if it will think and act on my behalf and allow me to go through my different states. Amazon does, job boards don’t.

[DaveMc500Hats]

hey jeff -

nice post, and thx for the kind words :)

my comments on joel's blogs addressed the "active" candidate angle, primarily because i thought peter's original post sounded a bit too high-brow... altho i do understand his perspective, i don't think anyone should be dissed just becase they aren't ashamed to say they're looking for another job. not *everyone* who's looking just got fired (but if so i know a site they should visit ;)

as for "passive" candidates and communities of interest -- you're correct we've been a little quiet about what we've got cooking, but we do have some ideas on how to engage those folks as well. and maybe we just will create a community for like-minded job seekers who believe the truth is out there...

more to come soon,

- dave mcclure
www.SimplyHired.com

[Jason Gorham]

Jeff, just a couple of points and thoughts and I do believe that you hit the nail on the head. We are currently are partnered with both Simplyhired and indeed and do value and trust their partnerships as this was my model when I first started out...thus the name metasearch. As with any home page site and or search engine including monster careerbuilder etc you need to market to get these people engaged and get them to visit the site. Whereas our Push Posting utilizes the ppc model to push our ads out to where people spend time online, thus this is more of a methodology than it is a job board, because you need the right ad, right time, right candidate (Our R3 methodology)then you need to capture them and consistently engage them. Remember they aren't looking for a job so even after we have lead the horse to water we need our employer to make them drink. So we have been working on this system and should be due to launch this year. If you don’t believe that this works Hotjobs just reinforced our model…read my blog at jasongorham.com to learn more.

[Internet Inc]

Here is a list of the vertical job search websites. Please let me know if I've missed any appropriate boards!
http://www.internetinc.com/job-search-verticals-list

[Emily]

Another great job search engine to help job seekers look for jobs: http://www.careerjet.com