Blogs adding recruitment links

Guy Kawasaki has added a job board to his blog — for $49 you can get a “top jobs” type of listing on the right rail of his site.

I have a highly-qualified readership of people with entrepreneurial, evangelistic, and technical backgrounds that should appeal to companies trying to kick butt…at least that’s my assumption.

For Guy, that’s a pretty safe assumption. And it started me thinking, there are other blogs with industry-specific, specialized audiences and those blogs could also add job boards. And then I thought, I wonder if there is an opportunity to create a service for bloggers to sell and manage job ads. Then I read this in Guy’s commments:

Interesting to see all high profile bloggers adding a job board.

I haven’t seen any other high profile bloggers with job boards, but then maybe I don’t read enough high-profile bloggers. I’d like to know if Guy is using a vendor for this service, or if he built and manages it himself?

The other aspect here is it seems logically that we’ll see more bloggers add job boards. There has been a strong trend toward aggregating recruitment listings (Indeed and Simply Hired, for example), but for better paying jobs, targeted placement makes more sense. But then if there are a bunch of small niche sites posting jobs, even in the same field, how does a job seeker find all the postings? And on the flip size, what is the expense tolerance for employers? How many times will they dish out $50? There still seems to be a place for aggregation, but especially on the placement side — and maybe the model isn’t flat-fee, but pay-per-response.

UPDATE: The next RSS feed I switch my attention to after this post is Business Pundit, who tells us about JobCoin.

UPDATE II: There’s another implication for blogs and media related to this development: More ways for bloggers to make money, and for those with large enough audiences, to become financially indepedent (meaning, no day job). We’ll probably see new businesses launch in 2007 that seek to match advertising with blogs. It’s not just AdWords and BlogAds anymore.

UPDATE  III:  At dinner, I told my wife about this post and as I talked, I realized something else significant about this development:  It’s another step in the stairway of disruption.  Consider, blogs at first made no money, but the audience grew. Then bloggers started making donations and a few, such as Andrew Sullivan, did well for themselves.  Then at about the same time, along came AdSense and BlogAds.  Now bloggers are moving deeper into newspaper space by accepting recruitment ads.  And think of this, too, this isn’t craigslist-for-free ads.  For years I’ve argued that nobody really thinks blogs could be a real threat to newspapers, but if a clear economic model begins to solidify, so that the best bloggers can make money providing alternative media, it presents a much deeper (though not necessarily fatal) threat to traditional media.

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2 thoughts on “Blogs adding recruitment links

  1. Hi Howard-

    There are 2 big blogs that I know of that currently have job boards.

    TechCrunch has CrunchBoard http://www.crunchboard.com/ and Om Malik has GigaOm Jobs http://gigaomjobs.com/ . Both of them serve that tech niche.

    I would expect the expense tolerance to be quite high. I actually think $50 is pretty cheap. If you look at the sorts of positions being posted, you’ll see that these are very hard to fill positions. Working in Silicon Valley myself, I know how hard it is to fulfill a req. Many people often pay thousands of dollars to pay headhunters. $50 a month is tiny in the grand scheme of things. And given how these job postings are targeted at the perfect demographic, I’d say that this is going to be big.

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