Pay per Application Versus CPC

[Matthew Dewstowe]

Hi

Pleased to be the first to post on this Forum. Joel, great to read
your eBook - food for thought. However, my first thought.......

Classifieds is indeed a generic space, however jobs classifieds is very
different to adverts for cars or houses. The only pre-requisite for
buying a house or a car is that you have the money.

Applying for a job is different. One must be suitably qualified to be
successful. Also, applicants that are not qualified are simply wasting
the time of the employer. Now looking at a CPC model, you will find,
particularly in the UK, that employers will be paying for a lot for
clicks from recruitment agencies looking for leads.

So what about a pay-per-application model. Employers are more or less
guarenteed a response from a job seeker and not agency. This could be
extended further by looking at next generation CV ranking technology to
further qualify the application. Clicks get more expensive but the
employer gets better, more targetted responses.

The challenge then is integrating the two.

[joelch...@gmail.com]

Matthew,

No doubt a cost-per-acquisition model is appealing, and I'm sure the
major engines are working on something that goes beyond the current CPC
model. For example, a cost-per-call model is certainly in the offing,
where businesses pay based on phone calls from buyers.

The problems sneak in when the medium loses control. Google can easily
track clicks to your site via theirs, but knowing that someone has gone
to your site and bought, applied, etc. is much tougher.

- Joel

[Steven Rothberg]

Joel:

A cost-per-hire model is technically easy as many organizations use
affiliate programs to pay-per-sale and the entire process is automated. The
problem in the recruitment world, as they say, is the last mile. The vast
majority of employers are unable to track which leads came from which
sources, let alone which of those leads converted into sales. The technology
is there. Talk with any of the major applicant tracking system companies and
they'll tell you how to do it. The problem isn't the technology. The problem
is the willingness of the employers to make the investment in time and money
to truly understand which of their employees were hired from which sources.
It is rather astonishing that organizations don't view that missing piece of
information as being more mission critical than it is.

------------------------------------
CollegeRecruiter.com
Steven Rothberg
President and Founder
Ste...@CollegeRecruiter.com
3109 W 50 St Ste 121
Minneapolis MN 55410-2102
tel: 952-848-2211
fax: 702-537-2227
mobile: 952-848-2211
AIM: sjrcollege
------------------------------------

[joelch...@gmail.com]

Good point. I wasn't expanding my vision enough. I'll blame it on the
relentless cold that currently plagues me.

[joelch...@gmail.com]

Steven,

So if I'm a job board, why not offer a solution where employers only
pay-per-applicant?

- j

[Matthew Dewstowe]

It has got to be a compelling argument! Applicants can be easily
tracked this way and so the advertising has clear performance measures.
Maybe job boards are just reluctant to this change and it's only a
matter of time before the market forces them to do something
different......

The only problem is, as I understand it there is a lot of what you guys
called Resume Spam (I'm UK) - employers are inundated with CVs.
Although this will always happen. Surely, if job boards look at next
generation technology to help employers automatically screen candidates
this has got to have promise????

Matthew

[Steven Rothberg]

Joel:

We do. Lead generation on a cost per lead basis is the fastest growing part
of our business and is one of the factors that sets us apart from our
competitors, many of which are reluctant to move beyond the traditional
advertising model and into the pay-for-performance model. The latter moves
our services closer to the actual goals of our clients, for they are not
paying us to generate resumes for them as much as they are paying us to help
them hire well qualified candidates.

------------------------------------
CollegeRecruiter.com
http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com

Steven Rothberg
President and Founder
Ste...@CollegeRecruiter.com
3109 W 50 St Ste 121
Minneapolis MN 55410-2102
tel: 952-848-2211
fax: 702-537-2227
mobile: 952-848-2211
AIM: sjrcollege
------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----

[geoffj...@gmail.com]

[geoffj...@gmail.com]

Interesting read with lots of stuff that we already know but haven't
done!

Following on from the ideas above, job boards would love to be able to
charge per placement. This is not going to happen as in Australia 90%
of there revenue model is recruiter fees. But an employer only job
board that as per Joel's idea, provided some back end tracking could
achieve this. It would be like being a recruiter and a job board in
one. Food for thought!

[Matthew Dewstowe]

Hi

This topic is heating up. Would commentators agree there is a model
for taking jobs direct from employers (either by employers posting them
or more likely by taking them direct from their corporate careers site
as this eliminates spam) and serving them as organic search results for
the job seeker. A PPC or PPA model could be build around providing
sponsored links as well as other value-add services and models
addressed by Joel in Battling Free.

One of the problems in the UK is that 75% of adverts on job boards are
from agencies. This means that one would only truly look on a j/b if
one is 100% looking, otherwise casual contact with an agency will
usually result in the agency hounding you until they place you.

Allow job seekers to connect direct with all corporate career sites and
surely this model would attract more passive job seekers, tentatively
looking at one companies recruit their skill set.

Matthew

[Steven Rothberg]

The problem with scraping jobs from an employer's site is that you need
their permission to do so if you're going to run more than an excerpt.
Otherwise you're looking at a violation of their copyright interests. And
you won't be able to be paid per hire unless the employer has the proper
mechanisms in place to truly and accurately track the source of their hires.

We've been on-line since 1996 and in that entire 10 year period I've only
run across one employer that I know is accurately tracking the source of
their hires. They're big and they hire a lot of college grads and they
understand that they can't make appropriate decisions about from where to
source their candidates if they don't know from where they get their hires
and what happens to those hires. But even they have the problem of properly
attributing the source of a hire because many of their hires are referred
from multiple sources. If the candidate clicks through from a banner for the
employer on my site and then clicks through from a job posting on another
site, who gets credit for the hire? The employer's policy is to credit the
last site from which the candidate was referred, but if the candidate
applied after clicking through from my site and then re-applied after
clicking through from another site, shouldn't my site get the credit?

We can debate until the sun goes down what employers could and should do.
But the fact of the matter is that no job board is going to change the
world. That thought mentality, fortunately, went poof in April 2001.

------------------------------------

CollegeRecruiter.com
Steven Rothberg
President and Founder
Ste...@CollegeRecruiter.com
3109 W 50 St Ste 121
Minneapolis MN 55410-2102
tel: 952-848-2211
fax: 702-537-2227
mobile: 952-848-2211
AIM: sjrcollege
------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----

[Hal Segal]

For those of us not sufficiently knowledgeable, what are you referring to
that happened in April 2001?

[Steven Rothberg]

When the stock market crashed. That event was the end of the dot com,
irrational exuberance era. Internet companies were forced to do what some of
us were doing all along: earn profits.

[Matthew Dewstowe]

Naturally if we were to scrape jobs we would not infringment copyright.
In the UK this permits you to showing 255 characters I believe. The
content would be scraped in full like Google/Yahoo and used for
indexing purposes only. When users search for jobs they will be
redirected to the referring page.

If, in the case of some dynamic pages, the content is not available
when the page is clicked on then a cahche could be shown. Happy to
hear from anyone who can confirm caching is illegal in UK - I know of
no precedents!

Matthew

[geoffj...@gmail.com]

I think the PPP (pay per placement) model is slower moving strategy as
you would have to strike a prefered supplier agreement with the
employer, so you were the only source of candidate capture.

[Matthew Dewstowe (Innovantage)]

I think

|-----Original Message-----
|From: battli...@googlegroups.com
|[mailto:battli...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of

[Matthew Dewstowe]

Hi

Pay per placement is a different model than pay per application. Pay
per placement would involve a much closer arrangement with the employer
to follow the tracking of candidates once they have been submitted
(through to placment).

Pay per application simply involves tracking an application to the
site. As far as I see it the only way this can be done is by a
Sponsored Link template where only applications generated through these
links are paid for.

[Steven Rothberg]

We actually work with a number of employers on a pay-per-lead basis. They
define for us what they consider to be a "qualified" candidate. Based upon
the attractiveness of their opportunity to our users and the fields that
they require for the lead to be qualified, we set a price per lead. An
example is the U.S. Army National Guard at
http://jobs.collegerecruiter.com/Military/Form/ARMForm.asp .

------------------------------------
CollegeRecruiter.com
Steven Rothberg
President and Founder
Ste...@CollegeRecruiter.com
3109 W 50 St Ste 121
Minneapolis MN 55410-2102
tel: 952-848-2211
fax: 702-537-2227
mobile: 952-848-2211
AIM: sjrcollege
------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: battli...@googlegroups.com [mailto:battli...@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Matthew Dewstowe
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 2:20 AM
To: battling-free

[petergold]

Quite a long thread and various ideas. Thought I'd throw in some
points!

In the UK I work with a number of retailers who try very hard (as a
result of my pestering!) to track applicant/hire source. This is made
difficult by the e-recruitment systems being limited in their ability
to automate this function (only 2 do it well). So, they know pretty
much how many hires per job board. We have suggested that the job
boards work on a charge-per-hire basis whereby if they perform at their
average measured over the last 24 months then they would make at least
the same amount of revenue, possibly more. Didn't see the need for
THEM to take this much risk??!! So, pay-per-placement difficult to get
agreement for.

In contradiction to the above, HR generally like to know their cost in
adance almost regardless of how well it will work.

We are now trying to get some of our customers to monitor
quality-of-hire and compare performance and retention of people and see
if there is any difference between applicant quality based on source
e.g. do agency hires actually stay longer than active job seekers who
applied direct? Should be interesting analysis, who knows what it will
show.

As for UK job boards being mainly agencies, this is true yet a high
number of applicants do prefer to go direct to the employer. Virtually
50% of search related traffic we monitor includes the employers name.

We have just set-up a new employer only portal that links job seekers
direct to their choice of retail employer - too early to say how well
it will work.

Job scraping - I think it has merits but depends how it will be
applied. We've got some idea's but still just an idea at the moment!

Sorry for the long reply.

Peter Gold
Hire Strategies Limited

www.hirestrategies.co.uk

www.retailhomepage.co.uk