SnapTalent - Distributed Job Advertising
March 13th, 2008 by James
Recently there have been a number of attempts by job boards at tapping into the Long Tail potential of blogs and widget-enabled social network sites through distributed job advertising. While millions of blogs, forums, social networks, and other websites have been living off the revenue sharing from Google Adsense, so far nobody has come up with a good solution for distributing job postings. SnapTalent launched today, looking smarter than other efforts made in this area (including Monster’s Career Ad Network).
Promising to help you reach higher quality hand-picked candidates that would never have discovered your company otherwise, SnapTalent ultimately consists of little more than small preview of a job advertisement in a web page, expanding to a larger version with more information that supports images and embedded video (from YouTube, Google Video, and Vimeo). The value of the service depends on where the ad is shown, so if a lot of website owners sign up and participate then it will open up new opportunities for recruiters who understand their target market.
In 2007, it became common for popular bloggers and news sites to launch a job board. For example, Joel Spolsky, has a niche job board affiliated with his software blog which sees regular postings at a cost of $350 per job and gives you access to the highly targeted demographic that frequents his site. SnapTalent goes a step further by integrating the job advertising into the page itself. Consider that the tech news site TechCrunch is currently the most requested advertising destination on SnapTalent, despite already having a traditional job board attached. It reflects the fact that many of the really good quality candidates (both active and passive) never take the time to visit a job board.
Other advantages for advertisers include the ability to pre-pay for clicks rather than per posting. A cost $250 for every 500 clicks sounds like good value, although I prefer to see more intelligent billing system (e.g., based on salary or competitiveness like Adsense). A portion of the money goes to the website owner, and there should be no shortage of site owners participating as long as this pays better than AdSense.
I did encounter some bugs and JavaScript errors while using the site itself, but I’m sure these will be ironed out soon. Critically, the ads look good. They are customizable, with unobtrusive popups. SnapTalent’s main selling point could end up being the ability to analyze and improve targeting of the jobs, ultimately leading to higher quality candidates and better efficiency overall. SnapTalent does not revolutionize internet recruiting, but it is another step in the right direction and is worth keeping an eye on.
