Barney Pell's Weblog

Konstantine: The idea of putting all social things in one place is proving not to work out. At 20, you're trying to socialize and make new friends. At 30, when you're married and have kids, you're just keeping up with your existing friends.

John: We came up with tens of social and business networking sites. Tons of classifieds. Is this an area ripe for consolidation?

Craig: The trend is the other way, toward self publishing. For community, it makes sense to aggregate. I love Craiglist, but when I want kayaking gear I go to a dedicated kayak community site.

Gautam: I agree consolidation will happen. But another trend: The user continuous is empowered with information and choice. At some point the old models will break down. That's the opportunity for new large players to emerge. We'll see whether simplyhired and oodle are in that category.

Garrett: Search and community axis. We focus on community.

o John: Over the last weeks, the 800 pound gorilla has been making its presence felt, that google is planning to launch a classifieds product. If google enters the space, what does that do to you?

Craig: We'll include them in Oodle search...

Gautam: I think Google will shake things up. A large player will enter the space and validate the market. Google's offering will be extremely large scale and in many ways very different. What they haven't done so far is show its market dominance with specialized offerings, e.g. Froogle is competing just ok with the rest. It requires specialized search, community, and content to create something compelling for the user. Is Google really willing to do what it takes to get the user through all the way to the actual transaction.

Garrett: Google's an important partner of ours, we're one of their largest customers. What they'll do is in the interest of their shareholders and partners.

o John: Monster is charing $395 for a single job posting. Craigslist SF charges $75. I'm a recruiter at a small company, and discover that the small vertical sites are giving my listing as much prominence as Monster. What I would I pay $395?

Gautam: There are always users who will go to monster and craigslist that would never go to simplyhired. But there will be pressure on the big boards, when some bigger players get into this market. In addition, you have companies that need to go out and find the best people. They'll go to all the destinations to get them. Monster will have to adapt.

John: But now I'm going to sell my used car, and put it in craigslist for free instead of $49 on newspaper. How will that change things?

Craig: People are already going to multiple places. I think a basic online listing will be free. The opportunity will be for local papers to leverage their assets to create upgrades they can charge for. How do I create a composition of products that helps my advertisers more effectively sell.

John: Ebay took most of the market from newspapers for private party merchandize ads. How does vertical searches and capabilities that Ebay brings to Kjiji impact the...

Garrett: Overwhelming majority of transactions take between particular localities, not within a locality. For other categories, there is an issue of pricing. If you're paying $395 on monster and can almost the same value on craigslist for $75, how long can you charge for that rate. But there is a part of the population that will always go to newspapers.

Konstantine: We're in the unique position at linkedin where we are charging for the listings, but then you have to add value above the simple listings. So even after we integrated the simplyhired jobs, people still buy listings on linkedin. People can do independent reference checks, etc. On the consumer side, people can go to different places. LinkedIn has a pool of people you don't find on Monster. As long as you add value you can charge for it. If you can deliver value in a way that's performance based, then you can maintain your customers.

John: How to be the leader in your category?

Konstantine: Address the major needs that your customers have. If you can address both sides of the marketplace that's even better. We appeal to the needs of the hiring managers and the job seekers. If you can retain that, there's a way to close the loop, and ultimately pay closest to the point of value. People might move to a cost per interview or a cost per hire model.

Garrett: Winner of what? There are different segmentations in different categories. Tailor your model to those particular spaces.

Gautam: In realm of job search, the winning company is going to create the best job database and will complement that with tools, content and community to take job seeker further down the lifecycle to finding that job. Building on a model that takes the larger players into account and aligning with them in meaningful ways. And building a new architecture.

Craig: We need to take every listing out there as quickily as possible, tag the listings, index them, rank them and assess them and get better and better.

q: People self publishing calssified ads and community sites. What happens when you scale to Google size?

q: How would Monster.com need to adapt to the new environment, besides indexing their competitors? Right now the big guys are charging a premium. What they're selling is mainly eyeballs. I'm relieved these new job sites have a feeling of safety in numbers, but Monster will respond...

Gautam: Your guess is as good as mine. What we know is the paid listings model will be under pressure. Instead of charging per listing, they'll need to charge per lead or hire and accept hybrid models. And integrating offerings like we did with simplyhired and linkedin. Finding a job doesn't have to stop with just the listing. More people will participate with different pricing models, that will grow the market.

Konstantine: LI is suited to recruiters but also to the individual hiring manager. That wasn't well served before, as people would usually just send a note out to the 30 people they know. Now we're saving time, and that's where the value comes from.

John: Jobster has that kind of email viral campaign.

q: Bob Wyman (Pubsub.com). How deep do you have to build your tech stack in a vertical. We search 12M blog entries, hoping to support as a horizontal service vertical search for jobs, classifieds, etc. Can you layer on existing services or do you need to build it all yourselves?

Gautam: I agree.

Craig: We build on whatever we can.

Garrett: Monster has a couple thousand people on the ground, to service individual clients. That's a different model from linkedin etc. Look at it from the sellers side, diferrent proposition for the Fortune 500 clients.

q: How to improve the search process?

Gautam: Resumes, social networks, source of the data, etc. There is a long way to go.

Konstantine: The data source is the hard part. On LI, you first see the jobs that your contacts have posted. If we take a job listing from simplyhired, we don't necessarily know who is posting. A job seekers dream is to know which of my contacts know people who are hiring, as those are the jobs you're most likely to get, even if your resume doesn't match what the job request indicated.

Garrett: A few years ago we were focused on ebay, but now we're adding other businesses with distinct value propositions. No real search site has got to scale on community yet.

q: Peter Rifkin. Newspaper business, people read the paper for content, and advertising is a drive-by encounter. When you take just a classifieds experience, what's the user experience to bring them back over and over again when they're only in the market occasionally (only 11% of the market is looking for specific vertical site's services at any time).

Gautam: An active job seeker finds a job and moves on. But there will eventually be an ongoing relationship with a user, toward the passive job seeker.

Konstantine: People list in linkedin because they aren't the active job seekers you find elsewhere. So we have a fine line to walk. We want to promote the jobs as they are powerful. But people use LI for many other reasons, like our new classmates for previous business coworkers. That keeps our users coming back, unlike just for monster and hotjobs.