December 2010: It feels like 2010 has raced by as the recruitment industry recovered and grew following the GFC. At CareerOne.com.au, we have seen the recruitment market substantially improve, with online job listings growing by over 33%¹ over the previous year with that trend accelerating in recent months with over 10%¹ job volume growth.

As the year closes, many of our clients are talking about the return of skills shortages across many sectors; more roles than quality candidates and the increasing need to review and reassess their talent attraction strategies. We have ended the year (November), up by 12% in traffic year on year, delivering 1.71 M Unique Browsers with strong growth in each state and territory, ensuring our continued place as the second largest online recruitment brand in Australia². More importantly, we are now attracting over 1.04 M exclusive candidates that did not visit Seek for job hunting during November². Our exclusive audience has grown by over 24% year on year against Seek, thus ensuring that in an increasingly tight candidate market, you are casting the widest possible net for the best possible talent².    

On behalf of the CareerOne.com.au, I’d like to thank you for your support during the year. It has been an incredibly busy and productive year at CareerOne.com.au as we continued to introduce new product innovations and leverage our JV partnership with Monster Worldwide. At the end of March, we introduced the final stages of our integration onto the Monster technology platform. This allowed us to introduce more engaging and individual experience for job hunters through personalised home pages, jobs recommendations based on your profile and advice forums. For advertisers, we introduced the first behavioural targeting capability applied to the recruitment industry, which allows you to target only known candidates from your industry with strong employer and recruiter brand messages wherever they are on the CareerOne site. This behavioural targeting capability has proven the value of getting your message to the right audience with response rates consistently over 10 times the industry average of .05%. This combined with our world class branding tools, like company profiles and templates,  has allowed innovative corporates and recruiters to the ability to position their brands effectively to relevant talent pools.  

In October, we introduced the new generation of search technology, Monster’s 6Sense Power Search in BETA form on both job search and our resume database. Monster’s 6Sense Power Search is world leading semantic search technology that understands the context and concept of words and phrases to ensure precision matching of job searches and resumes returns. We are working with our feed provider partners, who supply over 80% of our listings, to include physical location of the job to ensure the most relevant search returns for candidates and best visibility for advertisers.  As this functionality is undertaken by our feed partners, we will start to default Power Search as our main job search functionality. Our Power Resume Search product is being piloted by our current Resume Database customers, with positive results. The 6Sense Power Search when applied to our Resume Database increases recruitment productivity by providing matching scores for core and desirable skills and recency of experience. Power Resume Search will be available to the wider market early in the New Year.  

In October, we introduced a new Home Page, which ensures that our keyword/location search functionality has sufficient prominence with job hunters. It presents a cleaner layout to access popular editorial content, our Courses Section along with more display advertising opportunities. During October, we have also started our pilot of the CareerOne Ad Network (CAN). The CareerOne Ad Network is an innovative way to target relevant passive candidates across the spread of CareerOne partner sites. Our behavioural targeting capabilities, cookies candidates based on their search behaviour and serves targeted job listings to them through the News Digital Media network, Post Click and Adconion partner sites. This allows us to serve Engineering roles to known Engineers whether they are checking out cricket scores on Fox Sports and auction items on eBay. Initial results for the first month of the CAN trial have delivered a 59% increase in job views and 58% increase in applies, which is outstanding given the lag effect with passive candidates.  

In November, we announced that as part of our Monster partnership, we will be able to provide Australian companies and recruiters Monster global recruitment solutions, from any of their 60 countries, reaching over 100 million monthly visitors and with 36.2 million active resumes on their resume database. This ability to target talent internationally will become increasingly important as the skills shortage continues to take hold. We’ll be working with the Monster International team to provide our clients with Monster’s local market expertise, conveniently billed to your CareerOne account in Australian dollars.

2011 is predicted to be a solid year of growth for the recruitment industry.  CareerOne is well placed to introduce new and innovative ways of sourcing talent for Australian corporates and recruiters. In the New Year, we’ll be “officially” launching our Power Resume Search tool and CareerOne Ad Network, with a number of other products to follow throughout the year. 2011 is shaping up to be the year of the Resume Database. We believe that Resume Databases will increase in prominence as a preferred sourcing alternative. Our 6Sense technology and database growth will ensure CareerOne provides excellent value in the Resume Database space

As the year closes, I’d like to wish you, your staff and your family a safe, happy, festive and relaxing Xmas and New Year season. Thank you again for all your support during the year.  We look forward to continuing to provide real competition and recruitment alternatives in 2011.  

¹ CareerOne Internal Data

² Nielsen Online, Market Intelligence, Domestic UBs, November 2010