Copyright (c) 2010 Ianson

Google has become the online recruitment battle ground, with rising unemployment and fewer job vacancies online recruiters are fighting for survival. The quantity of job searches per day on Google runs in to the millions as a result of combination of people whom have lost thier jobs, are in fear of losing their jobs or those that just dream of escaping their current job. The truth is that most jobseekers are not loyal to any brand amongst job boards or recruitment agencies advertising vacancies and consequently they repeatedly return to the search giant Google searching for their following position to apply for.

Despite the recession and fewer jobs being vacant a growing number of job boards spring up every day with would be internet entrepreneurs thinking they have found the next great niche in the on line job market and that for a very small investment they can make their fortune sitting at home. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth, whilst the UK on-line job market is amongst the most competitive on the planet and is highly fragmented the battle for visibility on Goolge could not be greater. The handful of major generalist job boards in britain, spend millions each year on paid search engine placement, television, publication and radio advertising and search engine optimization. Whilst it's possible with a lot of hard work, a well structured job board and some reasonable level of investment for a niche job board to make a profit, the odds are stacked against the start up with a few thousand pounds, no knowledge of SEO and no experience selling recruitment advertising space.

Many recruitment agencies recognise that unless they are very large, which few are, they have little chance of recruiting at lower cost than the large job boards. Some recruitment agencies in small niche fields such as medical sales have managed through some seriuos investment to carve a high level of visibility on Google and are now enjoying recession beating low costs per hire.

The most worrying trend is the amount of web development agencies claiming to be expert in building job boards or recruitment websites and whilst some may look good and have adequete user functionality, the reality is that the have totally inappropriate site structures to be able to rank highly in Google for those long tail search phrases which actually are where nearly all job search traffic comes from. It's not really surprising that long tail dominates in job search, imagine you are a sales manager living in Newcastle, you are unlikely to just go to Google and type in "Sales Manager", or if you did you would find every job but the one you are looking for. People searching on Google quickly realise it is necessary to look for their job and often in their industry and their location, so they might search for "car sales manager newcastle" and find plenty of relevant results.

If a job board or recruitment agency website is not designed to have an optimsed page for all job titles and locations in its target market, it is unlikey to prevail and to gain the necessary levels of organic traffic that is necessary to possess a profitable site. Thankfully no single brand really prevails and as such the market is still wide open, something the few larger generalsit job boards try to convince the whole online recruitment industry that this isn't the case, they have it sewn up.