The latter part of 2008 was tough and early 2009 looks to be much the same. At CapitalJobs.com.au we’re finding it very challenging to recruit and retain advertisers. With the recent proliferation of job boards, there is plenty of choice out there in the marketplace and it’s a real task to convince advertisers to use us as a ‘secondary’ advertising platform, behind the old staples – SEEK and print media.

Money is short, so advertisers aren’t really inclined to go beyond their existing advertising arrangements, particularly as these sources have *generally* provided the goods in the past. I think we’ll just need batten down the hatches to see this ‘downturn’ out and I suspect that many niche and small jobs boards are in the same boat.

At times like these, the old ‘chicken before the egg’ scenario rears its ugly head – no advertiser wants to advertise on a site that attracts no visitors, and no job seeker will visit a website that has no content. Getting some momentum and critical mass is tough and I know that there are job boards out there that are sweating on this problem. The emergence of job aggregators isn’t really helpful either, because they compete for our customers’ ‘headspace’ and they boast significantly higher numbers of jobs.

After reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, I’m convinced that it will take some real innovation and a ‘killer application’ to really bite into SEEK’s market share in Australia. The first mover advantage has ensured SEEK’s predominance and no amount of advertising by Fairfax or News has been able to reel that in. MyCareer and CareerOne simply don’t provide anything different to SEEK, and SEEK was here first.

Whilst the niche job boards will slowly capture small pockets of market share, this will be easier said than done – unlike the UK and USA, where niche job boards have spawned successfully, Australia is a very small market and there just isn’t the room for all these job boards. Until somebody comes up with an application that does more than display ads / collect CVs then I suspect that the status quo will remain for some time to come.

In the meantime, I’ll keep racking my brain to come up with that ‘killer’ idea….

Clayton Wehner
http://www.capitaljobs.com.au