Even though unemployment is at the highest levels in a decade, companies are still finding it difficult to find the best qualified candidates to fill the positions that are available. The reason for that is because more often than not, the best qualified candidates are already employed and not necessarily looking for new jobs. Certainly not on job boards like Monster.com or HotJobs. So if the best candidates won’t seek out job openings on employment sites, the jobs need to seek them out.
That is the idea behind TalentSeekr, which is essentially an ad network for jobs. Companies fill out what jobs they are trying to fill in what locations, then TalentSeekr creates and tests multiple ads across the Web—social networks, blogs, forums, search engines, you name it. Based on the response rate and quality of the applicants that come through the ads, TalentSeekr optimizes the mix of ad types (banner, text, video, creative elements) and placement. (Watch the video below to see how it works). If more qualified applicants are coming in through LinkedIn than Facebook, it readjusts the mix. Hiring managers get a dashboard (see screenshot below) which shows the number of ad impressions, clicks, and ultimate applications resulting from the ads, as well as the geographic distribution.
“What we are doing is what job boards did to newspapers. Everybody knows the space is about to shift big,” says Ryan Caldwell, the CEO of EnticeLabs, the company behind TalentSeekr. → Read More
Another Y Combinator startup launches today, this one with the intent of making online job listings more effective. Snaptalent is essentially an advertising network for jobs (currently, jobs for developers in particular). Employers add their job listings and the service displays them on the sites of participating publishers. Sixteen programming blogs have signed up so far, bringing their 4.5M+ monthly unique visitors with them. Here’s an example of what two Snaptalent job ads looks like: snaptalent_run(); The system was designed to make it easy both for publishers to load the ad widget (a simple JavaScript snippet) and for employers to set up attractive advertisements, ones that perform better than the typical Adsense unit. Snaptalent has provided point-and-click tools that not only help employers design their banner-sized ads; they also allow employers to upload photos and embed videos that complement the text descriptions shown when users click on the ads. But here’s the really interesting twist to Snaptalent’s strategy for getting job listings in front of the best candidates: in addition to placing ads on the blogs and websites trafficked by the target demographic, Snaptalent actively detects the IP addresses of all those websites’ visitors. It then uses the IP information to determine whether particular visitors work for companies like Google – or are enrolled at universities like Carnegie Mellon – where the best talent can be found. When employers set up their job ads, they can indicate a preference for particular organizations and their ads will be shown to those organizations’ members. So how much does this cost advertisers? $250 for every 500 people who click on their ads, regardless of whether those people have been targeted by IP address or not. These pre-paid (and therefore guaranteed) clicks can be purchased in 500 unit increments up to 2,500 people per posting. Publishers who display the widget on their sites will get an undisclosed share of the revenue they generate. The founders of Snaptalent say there’s nothing else available that competes directly with their offering (although deadpooled Edgeio came the closest). Of course there’s a variety of companies approaching the online job listings market in their own way. Broadly speaking, Snaptalent should be grouped with the aggregators (Indeed, Simply Hired, ZamZim, etc.) rather than the destinations (Monster, HotJobs, Jobster, etc) because they most clearly recognize the importance of distributed listings. CrunchBase Information Snaptalent Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
