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Job Search Affiliate Programs

Saturday, February 10th, 2007
at 3:42am

You can generate RSS job searches through a single TagJag OPML pull: http://tagjag.com/jobs/keyword/opml (obviously, you’d want to replace the word ‘keyword’ with your own search term. I think I’ve uncovered just about every job search site that outputs RSS for search queries (if I’m missing any, please let me know). I only bring this up after being approached by at least four companies in the past month to start doing co-branded job search portals. While I’m sure this works well for some, it’s never really worked well for me in the past.

Even though I’ve just set job listings at $5 for 60 days through Simply Hired’s Jobamatic, I’m really not expecting a single bite. Why? Oh, maybe because I’ve set up job affiliate sites before and (despite sending good traffic) have wound up making far less than it costs me to buy a cup of Peet’s coffee.

When you join an affiliate program, you’re doing THEM the favor - NOT the other way around. I remember being impressed with Amazon’s affiliate revenue back in the day, and then millions of publishers came online during the dot-com boom. I’d have been lucky to score $20 in a quarter for sending traffic to Amazon after that. I’ve had a few small Amazon Web Services ideas brewing in my head, but have been waiting for a few more things to click before jumping on them (literally and figuratively).

It was suggested to me that the design of these co-branded affiliate programs may have been keeping people from clicking and posting. Page design has absolutely nothing to do with - and if it did, Craigslist would’ve failed before it started.

If I can’t hyperlink directly to specific back-fill job offers without losing the affiliate credit, success will be severely hampered (and I’ll be sending you even more “free” traffic). I understand I’m supposed to promote these links to my community, but do they understand that the same people (you) belong to 100 other communities that have job listings that are extremely similar (even if they’re not from the same service)?

Job search / job listings are a commodity – to an extreme degree. I could plug anybody’s URL for a year and maybe eke out one new customer and make a few bucks in affiliate revenue. These things simply DO NOT WORK without a hook, and hooks do not apply if everybody’s given the same set of tools. This is one of the reasons why having an API is a great start - but don’t leave those of us without extra developer cycles hanging.

It’s the classic affiliate conundrum.

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6 Comments

job seeker affiliate program - Reachton

November 30th, 1999
at 12:00am

registration submitted (free for job seekers) … Our contest and incentive programs offer plenty of opportunities to earn … http://www.snagajob.com/affiliates/default.asp... Search Engines:[AltaVista:3] [FAST:3] Job Search Affiliate Programs ~ Chris Pirillo When you join an affiliate program, you’re doing THEM the favor - NOT the other way around. … benefit is to the job seeker having to go to all of these … http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/02/10/job-search-

Job Search Affiliate according to Chris Pirillo at Michael Specht - discussions on HR and technology

February 11th, 2007
at 4:13pm

[...] I am amazed at how cool job sites have become in the last few months, it seems you are not part of the in crowd unless you have a job site!  I have been wondering what the benefit is to the job seeker having to go to all of these sites to find a job.  I know the idea is not that they go there specifically but they happen to see a job while on the affiliate site, but really does it work?  For me this model only works for a couple of very high profile sites, Arrington. Chris Pirillo (who seems to be thinking like me), provides a good run down of what is wrong with affiliate programs with his post Job Search Affiliate Programs :- Job search / job listings are a commodity – to an extreme degree. I could plug anybody’s URL for a year and maybe eke out one new customer and make a few bucks in affiliate revenue. These things simply DO NOT WORK without a hook, and hooks do not apply if everybody’s given the same set of tools. This is one of the reasons why having an API is a great start - but don’t leave those of us without extra developer cycles hanging. [...]

Francis Larkin

February 11th, 2007
at 4:35pm

Hi Chris,
I’m a product manager at Simply Hired — this is great feedback; thanks for broaching this important topic.

Even if you don’t get a large number of direct postings, I hope that it is clear that Job-a-matic’s backfill jobs will generate reveneue on a PPC basis (a la Adwords).

The Simply Hired team is working very hard to develop a product that does indeed drive serious revenue for bloggers…and the results that our Job-a-matic partners have seen thus far are extremely promising.

I’d love the opportunity to talk about this further and help you setup paid backfilled jobs. Drop me a note, and we’ll help you dial-in your job site.

Respectfully,
Francis

Jason Goldberg

February 11th, 2007
at 8:06pm

Chris:

I agree.

I’ve been talking to a number of the early adopters of the job search affiliate programs (other influential bloggers) and they all have very low expectations. The long tail on this is just too long.

A better way, in my opinion, would be to add free job postings and job search to your site and use it as yet another way to drive ad revenue on your site vs. trying to monetize the listings themselves. People will post jobs to lockergnome if it’s free, but I doubt they will pay $50 to pay you and then the next blog and the next, etc.

Wants some help with that?

bill

February 24th, 2007
at 10:33am

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