These days, I'm working for a company, that runs among other web properties a job portal. Now, I'm beginning to understand the business a bit. The business models/ biggest revenue driver is to sell database. Simple, create a good search mechanism around the database and sell it as value add to database sell. There are other business models too, but no revenues to write home about, e.g. some premium services to job seekers like touching up their resumes, provide prominence to these on people search and all, but not much. Historically, the premium service were the only revenue driver in India (Every job seeker needed to pay a fee for allowing businesses to easily access their resumes), but large requirements to hire good people in short span and some innovation from a start up changed all that.
As I understand, this requires a lot of branding effort to get job seekers to register on your portal and marketing/sales efforts to sell this registration data to recruitment consultants and employers.
This actually becomes a kind of chicken and egg problem, because the job seekers will register to your web property only if they find jobs that they want to apply to, and job providers will only buy database (and associated right to post jobs) only if they find job seekers, those they can contact and want to contact. And if you are in a upward spiral, you would need to be really stupid to stem the tide and god forbid, if you are on downward spiral or not number one and two in an over crowded market, no amount of marketing, telemarketing, e-mail marketing can create a sustainable cash flow (Good, I've started using some management jargon now ) . You stop your effort or limit it and you see a drop in new registration/old job seekers getting active again resulting into less job postings and activity from the job supply side (again).
Now, I don't know, may be,I'll ask our business people, why can't we create a google ad sense kind of business model.
I think it should go like this, similar to free job seeker registrations, database search and job posting is also free. Go ahead post the job for free and search as much as you like in the database, again for free. But 2 things change, we as service providers charge for service offered, i.e., if you want to contact a job seeker, we charge per mail/per phone call. If you want contact job seeker yourself, we charge a bit more and allow you to see the job seeker's contact details, available to you for next let's say 6 months after receiving a small payment. The payment is strictly pre payment. Every contact that you make and every application to your job ad or every impression that your job ad get or every click on your job ad, we charge a small amount. You exhaust your payment, re charge. You may define your limits per posting, we don't mind. You may define, if you want your ad to be e-mail marketed or telemarketed or not.
Can we have a long tail then?
Sunday, February 08, 2009
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