he chief executive of the world's largest jobs search engine Indeed.com believes Australian human resources managers are on the verge of "rapidly adopting" its alternative to online jobs classifieds sites, like Seek, however the Australian site's co-founder Andrew Bassat has downplayed the imminent threat.
Indeed.com now employs 100 people at its three-year-old Sydney office, and its Austin-based president Chris Hyams told The Australian Financial Review its "pay-per-click" model was resonating with job advertisers sick of the "pay-per-post" model of Seek.com.
According to IBISWorld, Seek currently controls 84.1 per cent of Australia's online recruitment services market.
"The problem with the pay-per-post model is that the amount the advertiser spends is always wrong, either too little or way too much. It's not based on performance so it's favourable to the job board that's getting paid," Mr Hyams said.
http://www.copyright link/content/dam/images/g/q/y/8/d/l/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1471840124225.jpg
Andrew Bassat says the 'pay per post' job ads model is still sitting pretty. Darrian Traynor
"The search engine model is still not well understood by human resources managers in Australia, but based on what we've seen in other markets, once people get it there is rapid adoption, just like what happened when the classified sites took over from print media." Related Quotes
May14GMT+1000 (AUS Eastern Standard Time)Sep11Sep1610155.11617.775
Last updated: Tue Sep 13 2016 - 11:54:03 AM View full quote Company Profile
Operator of online employment classifieds and education and training. http://www.seek.com.au/
Professional Services (202020)
ASIC 080075314
View all announcements
Indeed.com has nevertheless relied on scraping ads from job boards to build much of the 3000-employee, $900 million-turnover business it has become since it was founded in 2004.
Many of the 120,000 Australian jobs it claims are listed on its local site at any one time are aggregated from classifieds portals, recruiter sites or even from photos taken of "help wanted" signs in shop windows, through an internal start-up called Job Spotter it seeded last year.
Indeed's sales team works with the sources of these job vacancies to convert them into sponsored ads, which display more prominently and attract pay-per-click revenue for Indeed.
The balance of Indeed's listings are made up of ads placed with it directly, a five-year-old arm of the business which Seek's Mr Bassat said vindicated his company's decision not to work with Indeed or any other aggregator.
"It would be stupidity for us to do that. Why would we enable an organisation that uses job boards to grow their own brand and then starts competing directly with them?" he said when contacted by The Financial Review.
Mr Bassat said the Indeed user experience, which sends jobseekers away to a multitude of different sites, was a poor one to which he would not subject advertisers.
He acknowledged, however, that the pay-per-post model needed to evolve.
"That's why we've kept the starting price the same for so long – $260 a month is dirt cheap by international standards – and varied our offer on top of that," Mr Bassat said.
The most prominent examples are Seek's "talent search" and "premium talent search" products, which enable employers to mine the company's database of both active and passive candidates.
Seek credited uptake of these products for its 14.6 per cent rise in 2015-16 Australian revenue to $313.1 million.
Indeed, which itself grew revenue 60 per cent year-on-year in the 2015 calendar year, is preparing to launch its own version of "premium talent search", called Indeed Prime, in Australia.
This "curated shortlist" of candidates is focused on the technology industry for highly-skilled occupations like software engineering and data scientists.
Candidates are in part sourced from programming competitions Indeed runs to unearth talent, Mr Hyams said. It makes money from the service by charging 10 per cent of the first-year salary of a candidate, once they have passed three months' probation.
(20min delay)
