Monster.com is a fat target. It has a market cap of nearly $7 billion and generates over $1 billion per year in revenue. All that revenue is largely generated on paid job listings, starting off at $475 for a single listing. Hotjobs and a bunch of other services provide similar services, all for a fee. Even Craigslist charges for job listings in many markets.
Seattle-based Jobster, which has raised nearly $50 million in venture capital, previously had a similar model – charging employers a lot of money to help them find qualified candidates. But late last year they made a decision to try something different. They went through a round of layoffs earlier this year and are making a dramatic business model shift starting tonight, by making all job listings free (and much more).
Their goal is to do what PlentyOfFish is doing to Match.com. PlentyOfFish is a dating site very much like Match, but doesn’t charge its users to hook them up. The company is doing quite well based solely on advertising revenue, and has been a serious thorn in the side of the for-pay dating sites. By reducing the cost of a job listing to zero, Jobster hopes to make a large dent in Monster’s billion dollar a year revenue stream.
Jobster is also a social network, and is more like Facebook or LinkedIn than Monster.com or other job sites. Like LinkedIn, it’s a place people can keep their resume up to date at all times, even when they aren’t looking for a job. Users also tag themselves (your top five tags are called “supertags”), and Jobster will notify you of jobs that may fit your profile. See CEO Jason Goldberg’s profile page for an example. All of this tag-based matching comes from Jobby, a company Jobster acquired last year. Tags also help users match with other users, and additional information.
Employers can start listing jobs immediately and for free. The form (see image below) has just five fields (Company, Title, Location, Description, Tags). The employer will immediately be alerted to potential candidates based on the tags, and candidates will also see the opportunity appear within their profile. Jobster is also syndicating these listings out via RSS and other methods, so job search engines like Simply Hired and Indeed will be able to add these to other listings from around the web. Edgeio (a company I co-founded) will be one of the first partners to integrate Jobster data into their listings.
Given that Jobster already has a large footprint in the job listing space, this is more than an experiment. It’s a full frontal assault on Monster’s business model. This can also hit LinkedIn indirectly if people start focusing on Jobster as a more interesting place to keep their resumes and contacts. Monster will probably be keeping an alert eye on how Jobster is doing, and this may also force them to update their aging platform and pricing models to more modern standards. For employers and job seekers, this is nothing but good news.
In the same press release announcing the new product, Jobster also confirms the rumor that they have become Facebook’s exclusive partner for job listings (beating out Monster.com and others). The new functionality will be available this Spring.
“Jobster get’s serious about killing the Monster.”
I’m all out of creative tonight.
Oh by the way you should have used OkCupid instead of PlentyofFish to make that point…but what every.
gets that is.
How about “Jobster Gets Creative About Killing the Monster.” Not that they had to be Einstein to figure out the listings should be free, especially since they’re from Seattle, land of the free — and the CREATIVE
You see, this is the thing about my beloved Internet. Nobody is safe. So all you execs out there – I have this to say to you…you’d better milk those non-ad based-cash cows of yours as fast as you can and run.
And don’t even think about coming knocking at Web 2.0’s because we’re already hunting for you.
@Hasan
I like that one. Caught me off guard hehe.
OK, NYT headeline:
Seattle’s Jobster, with $50 million in VC Funds,
Must Milk Cash Cow before Web 2.0 deluge
Ok, changed the title to a variation of Hasan’s suggestion. Happy?
Many freemium based services flop .. So many have flopped over the years .
Just because its free does not mean they will succeed . What will happen is that the quality of jobs that jobster has will become junk … Just like the thousands of free classifieds sites out there . I just dont think large companies will suddenly migrate to Jobster . Even though plenty of fish is succeeding, they are about the only free dating site that makes that much money – about 300k Canadian dollars a month and all from google adsense . There are so many free job services out there . I predict that jobster will probably fold soon . Jobster has no real business model or revenue model .
Oh ! One more thing .. This is what happens when you enter a crowded suffocating market place … Sooner or later you get desprate !
Well I think the connection with Facebook is a great start at really trying to take down the big dog.
College students and especially soon to be college grads are what drive these job boards so grabbing the Facebook deal was HUGE.
Hey mike,
It’s me not Hasan
What’s Hot Today.com will be using a similar model for job listings.
http://www.whatshottoday.com
Free listings are invites for spam, the sucess of how the free job listings plays out would depend heavily on how they can fight spam listings.
Awful job site. Does nothing that hasn’t already been done. Offers no new value. I filled out their site survey with the following critique:
Very poor search results! Very inflexible! Very ordinary!
I searched for “Inside sales” and got a huge number of hits, which would be unusual, if accurate. So I filtered the results down using your very limited options. I chose last 7 days and 25 miles from my zip code 94010, the only options available. This reduced the possibilities to 592, still very unrealistic. Going to the last 24 hours reduced the list to 162. Sheese.
San Jose ISN’T 25 miles from 94010 (it’s about 40). Santa Clara isn’t 25 miles away (it’s about 35). So I tried to filter by 15 miles. That generated 82 hits. But Mountain View isn’t 15 miles away (it’s closer to 25). I think you may be measuring as the bird flies, which isn’t realistic.
And in all the searches I tried, 60-80% of what was shown had absolutely nothing to do with inside sales or even sales at all. What does this job have to do with inside sales?
P/T Furniture Assembler AD#0103
National Marketing Services | San Francisco, CA
Type: Part-Time
Payscale-icon Research salary on PayScale
National Marketing Services has part-time opportunities available for work in National Retail Stores in the San Fran, CA area. We are seeking motivated individuals to assemble RTA (Ready-to-Assemble) home and office furniture for display (desks, cha…
Arrived Today from GO Jobs
You need to make your filters work effectively and correctly. Zip code limiting would be a good idea (like on Dice). Should add search by phrase. Should add search in title only, body only or both. The user should be able to show as many jobs per page as they want (not just 10). You should be able to limit jobs to specific industries. There should be a way to let the user choose to NOT show postings by recruiters. Should show the date posted with the short job summary. Probably more but it would take more time to think of them.
From what I see, there is nothing distinctive about your service that I don’t already get elsewhere. I don’t need another 2nd rate service. I’m looking for someone who is going to add some real value to the problem of searching for a new job.
Thanks Mike. Happy
About the spam, they can filter it out, but they’ll first have to wait and see how bad it gets.
@jojoe: Hey at least you got registered I’ve tried to register several times now and I never get the activation e-mail. (yes I’ve checked my spam filter)
i don’t like the direction jobster is taking –
but i guess they have to make some change, or risk continuing losing market share
making it free will dilute its substance, from the job seeker’s perspective.
neither am i too fond of jobster partially becoming a social networking site.
from the employer’s perspective, i want to get down to business – i don’t want your personal fluff added in with your resume/profile
jobster is very iffy for me right now, i don’t look too highly of it – maybe people are sick of ‘Ster
monster on the otherhand, acheived it’s success titan success by being unique, with a well-brandable name and overall image
What a terrible site -no design for placing the content, no visibility of what exactly we are at, no smart ideas…and they comparing it to monster???? or linkedin…marketing bull…especcially with 50 mils…what a disaster and nothing new …i have been lost on the second page trying to find the job…and I am Sr. It consultant…who does it for leaving…
Great Idea in my opinion but the site is a terrible representation!…hopefully someone posts this on
http://www.randombull.net
“Free listings are invites for spam, the sucess of how the free job listings plays out would depend heavily on how they can fight spam listings.”
Amen, monster is the crap when it comes to handling this.
Jojoe has a good point, the search engine/indexing does suck bad.
Startups like this will never beat their competitors whilst they’re too short-sighted to limit their audience to the US only. Monster is internationa, why is Jobster US only? Contary to common belief, there is a very large world outside of the USA.
Hmmm…. the footer links don’t even work at present in firefox. They are broken. These are simple things they should be taken care before a release is made.
There are a lot of problems before they become a monster killer.Sometimes I think why dont they come out with a complete preperation.
Well I’m sorry to disagree but I think this is a brilliant way to go.
The site performs well, looks cool, runs fast and indexes well. Also it’s job robots are styled well and really do work.
In so many ways better than Monster,
good luck in killing the beast!
…also more friendlier, which is the clincher with most social apps.
Heh. Now is the time for all serious free services
i dont see why the new biz model can do any better.
serious job seekers still wont post their c.v. in a open board.
the social networking or blog players wont come here either- because of the very poor functionalities.
i would think its information design much better than the business design.
as a person who has actually placed job postings for open reqs, as well as searched through numerous databases, this might be interesting but simply from a job placement cost issue.
the larger issue is the ability to search through resumes, and to give me tools to maintain/manage my applicants, as well as to hook all of this into my internal HR tools….
if jobster does this…. (for free) then they might really be on to something…
peace
The facebook partnership is an interesting one. I know of no one who is comfortable using myspace to find jobs. Facebook on the other hand, might be far enough seperated from purely social interactions to make it worth while.. Especially as the users start becoming more and more alumni.
Then again, I hardly ever use facebook now that I’m alumni :\
Jobster ignores Canada. Monster doesn’t.
A as business that was a B2B sale, it is always best to have a revenue model. The CEO is having a announcement today at 10am Pacific time. To offer free posts will open up quite a few spam (work at home) type of jobs that will drive employees and employers away from the site.
These guys make me laugh. They’ve gone from a referral network, to a job search engine to a job board in six months and they still can’t figure themselves out.
As a conservative estimate I would guess they get around 70% of their current job listings by scraping job boards. Case in point http://www.jobs.../jobs/for/linux
So is it a sensible strategy to compete directly with your source of content? What heppens when the major job boards block Jobster from indexing their content **WHICH THEY SHOULD START DOING NOW, HELLO WAKE UP ** Jobster would be nothing more than a entry level job board with poor design and execution.
There is a reason why the other job search engines are NOT allowing companies to post paid jobs on their site directly, never mind free jobs. It’s just not a smart strategy if you are in the aggregation game, and currently that’s the only game these guys are bit players in.
I’ve heard their CEO talk the talk on numerous occasions, all fire and brimestone about FIXING THE RECRUITING BUSINESS YADA YADA YADA
Well why don’t you start by fixing your site, your model and your strategy first?
It’s all a bit silly innit
I am taking this opportunity to trash Monster. I have got lots of leads via Monster and I understand there is a good customer base.
But recently they changed their UI so that there is more space for advertisements. I think this is a very stupid move because their user base is just going to deteriorate. I would rather go to Career Builder ( Which I think have improved a lot with their filtering technology build in) or jobster or indeed to get the info I need.
All the major job boards are awful, and when I first started using Jobster a year ago, they were focused as a referral network and a way for recruiters to manage their contacts and prospects – focusing on the lead generation and sales aspects of recruiting.
The app was elegant – small and easy to use. Then they started to add layers, awkwardly transitioning into social networking, positioning themselves toward jobseekers… and their client service disappeared.
I’m still on the site recruiting, but I use LinkedIn more and I get more results from that. Between Craigslist and LinkedIn, I do pretty good recruiting.
My biggest beef is with jobseekers – someone would be really to focus a business on getting them educated about recruting – I think LinkedIn would be a great place for something like that.
Jobster will continue to exist in a weird place for a while, but I don’t think they’ll ever dominate the space.
Well done Jobster, I think the one thing people over look is that when free sites are large they can get momentum and explode. Just take a look at craigslist. Jobster may well grow to the place to be for job hunting.
Rawgutts: True, monster is full of spam now but hey they get paid for those, so good for them and imagine how much more spam it would be if it’s free over at monster.But in Jobster’s case, they DO NOT get paid for any spam listings, so not so good for them
I’ve been keeping track of the job search startups and here’s some charts that I thought might be interesting. The 3 hottest startup now is the job space in my opinion is Indeed.com, Jobster and simplyhired. If you look at the charts, you can see clearly why the move on Jobster’s part.
compete
http://snapshot...com+jobster.com
same thing on alexa: http://www.alex...simplyhired.com
I see a lot of great comments on Jobster’s site and how things should be improved, I would love to have you sign up for our private alpha over at Payscroll, we are planning to start private alpha sometime end of the Feb or early March. Thanks!
I think this is a cool move, and should only help their business move forward (as long as they can keep the spam controlled). The comments here bring up interesting issues… here’s what’s going through my mind (from a job seeker’s perspective):
– job boards are NOT the silver bullet. The traditional model of a job board is based on getting revenue from postings or advertising – not by adding value to a job seeker (this means they’ll take the hundreds of $$s even if the posting sucks).
– social networking is not the silver bullet. There are some great synergies between social networks (specifically LinkedIn and FaceBook) and job search (or, career management). But its confusing to know which sites i need to be on, participate in, etc. to really get to those job leads. LinkedIn is lonely when you have 5 connections!
– we need to think about the job search is a subset of CAREER MANAGEMENT. There are other tools to consider, like Emurse.com for managing your resume, Naymz.com for working towards managing your personal brand, etc.
Its all about pulling together the right resources to get “the job” done. There is not one silver bullet – there are just lots of resources.
I applaud Jobster for this and hope they can sustain their model – I think there is a place for them.
I think the PlentyOfFish comparison is a little weak, as Markus does really well for himself with limited costs and staff, but this is company that has collected 50 million in VC money and will need to pay back some multiple of that to be successful.
I would be interested in how may paid listings they had here in seattle before they switched, I suspect despite advertising a ton on busses, they are not very front of mind with job seekers here, and few recruiters / companies paid for listings.
Yahoo and Craigslist originally had free job listings but had to start charging in many markets because of job spamming and abuses of the system (AKA Herbalife work from home, envelope stuffing, “become a model” porno listings, Google spamming, unpaid AKA work-for-free jobs, etc).
There could very well be ways around it other than charging money, and perhaps Jobster has, but it would seem that with Craigslist’s “for-free” attitude that charging money was a last resort for them.
I still contend that no past or present employee will post honest information about their employer, unless they truly are a happy-go-lucky individual who just loves everything. To get a honest perspective on what a company and its culture are really like, people need the ability to have some anonymity to protect their own interests. Everybody has qualms about their company, even if they really like working there. Those things will never come out in a social networking atmosphere, because employees want to protect how their employer perceives them.
Nonetheless, the conference call this morning still impressed me. It needs more traction in the market before I’m on board though. Their current numbers aren’t incredibly impressive, despite how colorful Jason Goldberg makes it out to be.
Have you ever tried a free dating site? The profiles are garbage. And since there’s no barrier to contact most of the emails are spam. This is a total desperation move.
hey – since you do so many comparisons between competing products (like email: http://www.tech...and-yahoo-mail/) how come you don’t do a comparison of classifieds sites like http://www.edgeio.com or is it cause you own part of this site and don’t want to show the competition
I would be interested in seeing a comparison. I did a search on the posts for Edgeio and could find none where you had done a comparison.
cheers
Regardless of the success or failure of this latest move, Jobster is no threat to Monster and likely will never be. There are literally billions of dollars of delta in the brand investments alone, not considering the habits of tens of millions of people on both sides of the job market and the sheer volume of goodwill (in the accounting sense) involved. Also, the Monster resume search seems to be a big profit center too.
this site is beyond bad. first it wouldnt even let me sign up since it claimed my email address is invalid (its a .name, and my username is 1 char). so i make up some BS alias to get around their broken validation script, and then get the ultimate insult.
thats right, this ‘web 2.0′ site doesn’t even accept HTML as a valid resume format. thats right. .doc favored over .html – what is this, 1996?
also, a telltale warning sign appears in their own text: “an email address is enough contact information for recruiters to reach you.” .
as anyone knows, the last thing you want is your phone ringing off the hook with recruiters. actual companies are fine, but how do you filter out all the saleseople with no real aim other than driving the revenue of their own ’service’ ?
If simplyhired didn’t explode it’s traffic numbers inside MySpace, why would anyone think Facebook will ‘drive’ Jobster. Job postings–free, paid for, bundled, aggregated, scraped—just don’t work. They breed ’subjective resumes posted out of desperation by unemployed, or unhappy people.
This guy at Jobster is a bafoon, and an egomaniac—combine that with the fact that he has VC’s breathing down his neck, a new business model every 3 months, and you can punch this ugly pig’s ticket into the Dead Pool now.
Why not charge $16 for a listing, which must be from a genuine company or jobseeker, not an agency. Then have the responder pay the lister $2-16 per response. Works for some dating sites. Got to beat the 2-7 job offers I get spammed with every day asking for 11 years solid Java experience. (I’m 25!)
A bafoon, eh? Must be fun throwing stones.
Yes. We egomaniac CEO’s do read these boards.
To answer some of the more substantive questions, we’re trying to create a whole new economy for job listings. We believe that the value is in the match, not the post. So, we’re starting off with free postings, facilitating better matches, learning from site usage, and going to evolve towards more targeted and match-based models. Stay tuned.
We appreciate the comments and feedback on the site. We’re working around the clock on improving search results, making better matches, etc. Other comments and educated suggestions appreciated. What would make a better career site for you? Our model is to throw stuff out there, listen, learn, adjust, repeat.
We are building the jobster site with 3 principles in mind. Like them, hate them, debate them, do whatever you want with them, but they guide our actions:
1. We believe that career development is a lifestyle, not a transaction. That is why we are creating a service which people will want to use again and again to connect with people, information, and opportunities to further their careers.
2. We believe that the value is in the match, not in the posting. That is why Jobster offers unlimited fee job postings so that anyone and everyone can experience and help shape our new model for career matching. That is also why we are firmly committed to continued technical innovation on our premium hiring tools which hundreds of leading employers pay to use to hone in on better matches for their positions.
3. We believe that people hire people not resumes, and that people go to work for people not for job descriptions. That is why we are embracing digital career profiles which utilize user generated content, tag-based data and navigation models, and video, to help bring the real person behind the resume and the job description to life.
One last thing. I’ve had more than a hundred emails today asking me how long the postings are going to be free? Always.
This is exciting news in the recruiting world. The media based model of Jobser is really designed to generate advertising revenue. Nice if people can find a job that was posted but most posters don’t reply to the job seekers that submit resumes on job postings. If you talk to candidates searching for work they tell you that there is a massive black hole that all the resumes must be sitting in because they rarely ever hear back after applying for a position. Many will show you the computer generated auto reply messages they receive with the “don’t call us” directions.
Matching is a great concept and getting a referral or seeing a video can help to match. Free is a better price than $475 but only if it fills your open position. The social networking aspect of these sites are fun but job seekers will tell you that they have to visit all the sites, not just one.
Over the past 10 years my recruiting teams have placed over 14,000 candidates into new jobs for placment fees of well over $500M, IMHO the war is on but it is far from over. With $50M in the bank you can do a lot of things but what people want to know is exactly how many candidates have found a new job that can be sourced back to a posting on Jobster or Monster or any other job board. Ask companies (not just the Fortune 500) where they get the best people…
My suggestion to job seekers is to wage a comprehensive job search campaign when looking for a new position. You need to think about yourself as a product being taken to the market. In addition to networking and searching you have to be out there in the market sell yourself. Think about your job as you would a marriage and take your decision of where to work very seriously. Right now the market is very strong and companies are hiring (layoffs are way down) so top candidates have a stronge negociating postion since talent is in high demand. Working with a good talent agent (recruiter) can also be of great assitance. You have to market, advertise, prepare, package and sell.
This is going to be fun to watch…
Craig Silverman
HireAbility – The Recruiter Network