By Dan Lindley
Even as it continues to fend off the unwanted advances of Carl Icahn and other irate investors, Yahoo has rolled out three new initiatives to improve its HotJobs employment site:
- HotHire, a matching service, scans HotJobs’ database of job candidates for keywords selected by an employer and automatically e-mails the employer matches.
- SmartAds turns HotJobs’ listings into display ads targeted at active and passive prospective employees across the Yahoo network.
- Premium Company Profiles helps employers build their employment brands online by using rich media and selected content from the Yahoo network.
All the initiatives were announced at the Society for Human Resource Management conference in Chicago, though each has been in the works for a while. HotHire, which has been available the longest, is the most relevant to members of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium and already has “hundreds” of customers, according to Kevin Krim, Yahoo HotJobs’ VP of product and strategy. SmartAds and Premium Company Profiles, more recently developed, each have a half-dozen or so major national accounts, he said.
HotHire is designed “to take the inefficiency out of the system and make it easier for recruiters and job-seekers,” Krim said. It lets recruiters check out a database of résumés on HotJobs in real time so they can “instantly get just the candidates they want,” he said. Job-seekers, he said, get “instant attention” and the incentive to keep their résumés updated to set themselves apart from the crowd.
SmartAds combines “the branding power of display advertising” with “the relevance and input of a search engine,” according to Krim. Based on Yahoo’s REAL search algorithm, rolled out earlier this year, (REAL stands for Relevance, Engagement, Availability and Location), the service figures Internet users’ behavior based on the sites they’ve visited, then presents them display ads culled from HotJobs listings.
Tests and early results show that click-through rates with the service are three to five times those of traditional HotJobs’ postings, said Krim (who declined to specify HotJobs’ normal click-through rate). The goal: to make these ads an integral part of the Web content that users are viewing, rather than an annoyance, like so many banner ads. When ads are targeted enough, Krim averred, they “become part of the content, like a good trade magazine, where readers scan ads as much as editorial.”
Yahoo’s third new jobs product, Custom Company Profiles, lets employers establish a branded presence on Yahoo’s network using Yahoo features such as Yahoo Answers and Flickr. Job-seekers wanting to know what it’s like to work at a particular company, Krim said, could look at the thousands of questions and answers on Yahoo Answers get an idea of the corporate culture – though he recommended that participating companies have an employee (identified as such) participate. Flickr videos can also help describe a company, and mark the first time that video will be available on HotJobs, Krim said. Companies will be able to pick which parts of the Yahoo network they want to use to brand themselves, he added.
All three products are aimed at increasing HotJobs’ reach beyond basic job postings to match new Web 2.0 offerings that seem to pop up nearly every day from other employment sites and social networks. Yahoo is hoping to leverage its search technology and reach to give HotJobs a boost, said Krim, who added that he expects the pace of new roll-outs to grow even faster.
