Pay Per Application offered by JumptoJobs

JumptoJobs.co.uk today announced the launch of their search engine for jobs. 

Basically it's a Google for vacancies.  JumptoJobs spider all UK job boards (unless requested not to) and index the results for jobseekers to search.  Recruitment agencies or corporate HR can "sponsor" their own vacancies so they are displayed higher in the search results.  This works on a similar model to Google Adwords.

As with Adwords you have the option to pay per click.  This starts from 12p per click.  However, and this is fairly unique in the UK job board market, you can instead pay per application (the price depends on the sector and other factors not revealed to me!). With both models the recruiter sets a maximum they are prepared to spend each day/in total - so that the cost is controlled. 

Interestingly pay per application has been mentioned on our discussion board today. I quote:  It will all be about Pay Per Application.... it came to me in a dream.

The downside of this (quickly pointed out by another discussion board user: "Inside Job"), as with Google Adwords, is that you can end up paying for hits/applications not for quality.  Also, as "Inside Job" points out for some vacancies you will naturally get a large response.  As he/she says who wants to pay for 250 applications for a Sales person in London with a few years experience on a basic of 17k? "Inside job" goes on to say that Pay per application or pay per click just doesn’t work for recruitment advertising. 

I don't entirely agree.  It's certainly a model that Jobster have introduced.  Whatever may be said about CEO Jason Goldberg (and I won't start on that now!) I believe that he's got some fabulous ideas for the online recruitment sector.  In fact on the up side a model like this might encourage recruiters to really concentrate on how they write their job adverts to ensure only the most relevant candidates apply.  As with Adwords there will always be problems of the wrong sort of hits and possibly competition trying to sabotage plans.  However, I will be watching this with interest to see who is next to offer this option.

Comments

[Brendan Maher]

Pay per application will eventually be the way forward forward for recruitment agencies and employers as well as for job boards.

It takes the a lot of the risk out of advertising because you don't pay unless it delivers. I don't think the quality argument really stacks up because most boards don't currently guarantee quality or quantity.

The quality of an application is always going to be pretty subjective and difficult to measure so I don't see any quality benefit to the old pay per post model.

Pay per application also has variable pricing based on the competitiveness of the sector so in areas where lots of applications happen the cost per application will be cheaper.