First and foremost, I am very flattered Yahoo Hotjobs is following our products and strategy. As they say, imitation is the best form of flattery. If you didn’t have a chance to see this as you were preparing for your Fourth of July, I will be happy to update you. Hotjobs came out with this press release.
A new advertising program from Yahoo HotJobs uses the portal's broader network to help recruiters reach passive job seekers, a sought-after category of candidates.
The Yahoo Recruitment Advertising (YRA) program helps employers and staffing agencies find candidates who are not actively seeking a job, but who might be interested in an opportunity if it is presented to them. That's a necessity for recruiters in a hot labor market like today's, according to Dan Finnigan, executive VP and general manager of Yahoo HotJobs.
"The labor market is getting hotter and hotter. It's clear to us that this is the year of the job-seeker," Finnigan told ClickZ. "Recruiters today have to become more like their counterparts in marketing. They need to find where the people are, and put their opportunities in front of them at the right time."
The YRA program packages ad offerings from other parts of Yahoo's network, such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, or Yahoo Mail. Recruiters can augment their job listings or resume searches on HotJobs with display campaigns on Yahoo's network, as well as paid and organic search campaigns. The ads can link back to the company profile page or a specific job listing on HotJobs.
The ads on Yahoo's network can be targeted to registered users by geography, the user's occupation or the industry the user works in. They can also be targeted behaviorally, based on actions that Yahoo determines are a signal that the user is open to hearing about a job opportunity. It uses the same kind of behavioral targeting capabilities Yahoo uses to determine if a user is in-market for an automobile, for example.
"People actively looking for work are not the only candidates a company wants to look at to fill their position," Finnigan said. "Adding passive job candidates can improve the quality of candidates available."
Incorporating search into a recruiter's strategy makes sense, since so many job seekers have done the same, according to Finnigan.
"More people are starting their job search at the search engine level, doing research about an occupation, potential companies, or kinds of jobs. If you can reach them there, you can get in front of them before they even get to a job board," he said.
Well my friend, when I began this product a couple of years ago I knew the power of it and now others are following suite. For a couple of years I have been preaching of reaching the job seekers where they spend time online and then capturing them to be able to market jobs to them. The passive job seekers used to be difficult to reach but now that’s even easier, it’s the capturing of that passive person that becomes the hard part.
Your next questions maybe how does this affect our site, our business, and strategy? Well it doesn’t hurt us, but helps us. This reinforces our product is a true player, has true value, and reaches the passive market. The other portion of this is I still hold a patent on the product and we actually get a better applicant conversion rate with Google, so even though Yahoo is a big player in search and content, Google is producing better results. That’s why we are platform independent. So as the engines change, we can change with them. The other part of the equation is Yahoo search engine doesn’t allow you to geo-target candidates. When you post an ad with Yahoo, your ads get blasted to the whole country, instead of your local area or to your state. So essentially you’re broadcasting an ad to the US, instead of targeting the people that you want to.
So in summary, I would have to say thank you to Hotjobs for joining our products and strategy, and reinforcing what my message has been for a couple of years.
