Talk of Many Things

Many people who are not actively looking out for a job may be induced to change if they come across something really interesting. But, how do potential employers reach out to them? Since such people are not actively looking out for jobs, they are not likely to be visiting standard job sites like Monster, Dice or Naukri.com.

JobCoin offers a nice solution.

Its technology enables bloggers to host job boards on their blogs to which potential employers can easily add job posts. With an un-obtrusive job post that can be configured to appear anywhere in the blog post, employers can show a glimpse of a  job opening to blog readers. Even if they are not actively looking out for a change of job, many of these readers might be induced to click on the job post link if it is catchy enough. When they do that, they are presented with the full job details. Sure, even after reaching this page, many readers may not apply for the job, but the recruiter has at least managed to present the job details to people who wouldn’t have otherwise noticed it.

The price for a job post can be decided by the blog owner, with the default figure being 100$ for 30 days. Once a potential employer posts a job, the blogger gets paid 70% of the price and JobCoin keeps 30%. Not a bad deal for the blogger considering he isn’t doing much more than giving away a small piece of real estate (roughly 400 pixels width x 50 pixels height) on his blog. In this manner, JobCoin offers an option to bloggers to monetize their blogs, apart from  the conventional contextual ad-based options like Google AdSense and AdGenta. 

Just to experience the process end-to-end, I signed up with JobCoin.com. After an easy signup process, I could configure a job board on my blog ("Talk of Many Things"). I especially liked the coupon feature using which the blogger can create discount coupons, which he or she can distribute to select recruiters in order to encourage them to try out this novel platform for their recruitment ads. An affiliate company Offshore-Writing.com posted a job on my blog’s job board and reported that the process was easy. They were especially happy to notice that their job post (shown below) went up immediately on the blog as soon as their credit card based payment was successful.

Once I completed the registration, I got a friendly email from JobCoin’s CEO Keith Schacht inquiring me about how easy its setup process was. I shared my candid feedback with him: While it is very easy to obtain the job board HTML code from JobCoin, novice bloggers might find the process of publishing the job board on their blogs quite daunting entirely due to the way blogs operate and due to no fault of JobCoin. From my personal experience with my WordPress-based blog, I can say that the process of finding all about template files and inserting new code into them is not at all straight-forward. Helping the blogger get this step right is critical to the success of JobCoin –  after all, until the blogger manages to insert JobCoin’s HTML code in into his blog template files and re-publish his blog, JobCoin’s job board will not appear on the blog.

I was happy to get an immediate reply back from Kevin acknowledging my feedback. I’m sure JobCoin will do something quickly to address this.

There are a couple more features I’d like to see in JobCoin to improve its functionality and the overall user experience.

First, I find that the job post page has a "washed-out" appearance — at least compared to most eye-catching Web 2.0 websites of today.

I hope JobCoin fixes this issue by providing a couple of attractive templates from which the blogger can choose one. Anyway, this is a cosmetic matter and doesn’t affect the functionality.

Second, I’d like JobCoin to introduce a facility by which the blogger gets to moderate the job posts that are bought on his blog. I know this will take away the immediacy with which job posts appear on the blog, but there is strong case for striking a trade-off between the immediacy factor and the blogger’s privilege to filter out some job ads that he doesn’t want on his blog for whatever reasons best known to him. I believe this feature could play a critical role in the acceptance of JobCoin by the blogging community.

In the overall analysis, I think JobCoin offers a unique value proposition catering to a niche market within the hot space of web-based recruitment advertising, and I see a bright future for it going forward.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 1:18 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.