Review: Beyond.com
No matter what they say, the job board is far from dead or dying. There is simply no other effective vehicle for communicating employment opportunities to people you don’t know. Job Boards have become an essential channel of the employment market.
They never were and never will be a panacea. No information distribution channel is a ‘one-size-fits-all-tool’ for very long. While newspaper classified ads had a long run as the reigning monopoly, the replacement technologies are all simply elements of an ecosystem.
It may sound overly esoteric but there is no real definition of the term ‘job board’. Businesses provide a large number of services under that banner. Employment branding, resume databases, traffic wholesaling, banner advertising, search placement, candidate management, niche-specific news, alternate media for communications, matching services,job wrapping, targeted Email, company profiles, micro sites and newsletter sponsorships all compete for attention in the Employment Website sales force.
Some of the most interesting business models keep a really low profile. Aaron Matos’ Jobing is highly visible in local markets but unseen in the majors. The same is true of JobDig which has a similar model. The low to the ground, somewhat distributed operation that delivers job info is increasingly common. It makes sense. Recruiting is local and nichey. It works differently (as does all of HR) depending on industry and region.
Last we, we talked with the folks at Beyond.com. On the surface, the operation looks surprisingly like the DirectEmployer’s vision for the future. The Beyond.com system features thousands of domain names operating on a single technical platform. Beyond.com hosts over 2,000 job boards (of the obvious search for jobs type) and has distribution in another 15,000.
A big technical challenge, for sure, but that’s not what makes this operation sing.
I spoke at length about Beyond.com with . Anderson is a long term industry player who has spent time at Trustar, Hodes, Appendant and now calls Beyond.com home. A recent addition to the team, Mark is responsible for ‘growing and managing a team of experienced business development professionals across various territories to expand the company’s brand, market share and overall recruitment advertising portfolio across major markets”
“We get to know candidates at the aggregate level and then build ever deepening relationships,” Anderson told me. “Once they’ve come and registered, we try to move the relationship to email. The various portals help us segment the traffic in a very refined way. For us, each piece of email we send a potential candidate helps us get a clearer and clearer picture of who they are and what they want.”
It’s an argument against too much focus on direct web experience and for a deepening reliance on data about specific candidates.
Beyond.com is sort of the opposite of the great job aggregators. They take all of the data they develop and use it to deploy clearer and clearer understandings of the market. Rather than starting with the goal of making a great big pile of stuff, beyond.com begins with a huge pile of job boards and uses traffic patters to clarify. Their very design produces meaning and anticipates the data structures of the semantic web.
It’s also great SEO. Beyond.com has the leading career page in a significant number of its 2,000 direct and 15,000 indirect niches. Because the company drives content to so many discrete niches, they end up serving lots of very fresh content, ‘:just the way the search engines like it.” The net result is that their jobs get extremely high search engine visibility. The try to harness the traffic, not as repeat visitors like most of the competition, but as tightly defined segments of job hunters by industry and niche.
Anderson says, “We’re the tool that you use even when you don’t know it.” By that, he means that no one knows the Beyond.com brand. Instead, they interact with the trench level implementations. Hundreds of sites like EEJobs, PhillyJobs, SalesHead, and TechCareers are the daily face of the company.
“We want to be a part of every company’s recruiting strategy,” says Anderson. “No one tool fits all circumstances. We are a smart and cost effective answer for a strategy that includes a portfolio of communications tools.”
As media continues to fracture and communications opportunities continue to multiply, there will be increasing value associated with narrow reach. While the rest of the players try to figure out how to add targeting precision, Beyond.com delivers it by design.
