Daily Mail acquires Broadbean
Posted by Alastair Cartwright [2] commentsAdmittedly this is last week’s news http://www.broadbean.com/issues/news/256-14/dmgt-acquires-broadbean.html. But it has got me thinking…
1. Will all the other job boards (not owned by DMGT) now reconsider linking to Broadbean? After all one of their major competitors will now have access to all their response data and more.
2. Will this allow another independent provider in the market to establish themselves?
The short answers to the above are: Yes and No.
Personally I am not convinced on the long-term validity of third party multi-posting software. My reasons being:
1. Unless you are recruiting across a huge variety of roles and sectors, you shouldn’t be advertising on more than 3-4 job boards. Now admittedly this is unhelpfully ambiguous, but you get my point I hope.2. The search engines of all job boards work differently. Ideally you should tailor your copy to each individual job board. There isn’t a one size fits all.
There is already a trend we are seeing where companies are spending more money on job board advertising, but that spend is being concentrated across fewer job boards. As the market matures I also anticipate that more companies will invest in their own applicant tracking and candidate management systems, these systems should provide their own multi-posting functionality. It will be interesting to see where we are this time next year. But I can’t see the likes of Totaljobs and Monster being very happy about Jobsite having access to all their response data.
At 12:36 am on October 23, 2008 , jobboardowner commented :
Would agree with you Alistair
Big, Big issue with this.
First off any client the job board wins that uses broadbean they may as well just copy jobsite in on the deal cause this amounts to the same thing!
Second,if jobsite notice that a certain sector is doing well next thing they will do is chuck up a niche board to have a go at it.
Third, as of today BB are comparing job boards on clients accounts, i.e if client has posting accounts with say Reed, Total Jobs & monster it will say you posted X jobs and got Y responces (no account of quality) % from each board and will say that Job board 1 is better than Job board 2.
The significance of this is that they COULD contact clients they dont have (as they have this data) and email them saying You post with X did you know based on existing BB clients that Jobsite is X more effective and as you are an existing client you can have X discount to try us!
They can use the BB data to thier own advantage.
Fourthly, they know when clients post with a specific board, how often and can marry marketing around this information
In all, Jobsite securing this business was good for them and very bad news for the Job board market.
The problem is they can dress the BB data anyway they like to suit their own objective
From my own point of view i will be certainly recommending clients move away from BB asap and any new clients that want a good multi poster i wont be advising them to use BB thats for sure.
I agree with you that a tool like this has a short life span anyway and BB imo got out at the right time.
The talk of expansion into Europe is utter BS - far to many alternatives exist in Europe for it to make any impact and besides, the tool has a short life span anyway, its just the damage that jobsite can do in the market with the data knowledge this tool provides.
Im amazed that one of the bigger job board players hasnt gone legal on this to stop it as its a form of anti competitive practice
At 10:31 pm on November 20, 2008 , Harmen Rijks commented :
Totally agree. Consolidation van be a good thing, but too much…… No thanks.
We have just declined their repeated request to create an xml feed to www.Eurojobs.com, partly because they have quadruppled the fee they charge us for having our site used by their recruiters and partly because they’re becoming like what Monster used to be. Too many fingers in the same pie.