Leading UK job board driven by SA technology

"Online recruitment is a prime example of technology operating at its most functional within an industry that demands efficiency and reduced time," says Kris Jarzebowski, MD of online recruitment service CareerJunction. "In this new offering, each player offers a critical service that melds into a package deal, targeting job seekers as well as job boards."

Part of the innovation lies in aggregating multiple UK job boards onto one job search engine in a popular portal. Tiscali UK provides the portal and the community reach, i2i Services is a developer of e-recruitment solutions for companies and job boards, and CareerJunction provides the back-end job search and matching technology. "It is a case of playing to our strengths in a widening global market," says Jarzebowski. "i2i Services provide technology to filter job content, as well as sales and marketing advice on the UK market, whereas CareerJunction has advanced search and matching technology that has been proven in the South Africa market.

"The unique nature lies not only in the aggregation model, where technology allows many job boards to focus into a mass audience portal, but also in the revenue model," says Jarzebowski.

Tiscali UK, a popular UK portal, serves over 132 million pages per month (Source: February 04 Nielsen/Netratings) to its community. The job search (www.tiscalijobsearch.co.uk) offers the community a wider variety of jobs from a number of jobs boards. Jobs sent by job boards are checked and filtered for quality, duplication and errors. The result is high quality content which is easily and quickly searched by job seekers. The search results then list a précis of each job found. "Only when the job précis is clicked by the job seeker is the full job ad displayed – and that's when the revenue model kicks in," explains Jarzebowski. "Each job board only pays for each click that the job seeker makes. Essentially, this is the most qualified pay-per-job advertised business model in the UK market."

The business model has not only been defined but a six month trial period has proven its value. The partnership began in November 2003 and post the successful trial period, the trio have now signed a 12-month agreement to roll out the service to other participants. The trial participants – JobSite.uk and JustGroup.net – and newcomers, TotalJobs.uk, Workthing.uk & Caterers.com - have continued with the venture. Currently there are over 80 000 jobs aggregated onto this job board, making it one of the biggest job boards in the UK.

"The number of clicks has increased a hundredfold since its launch and keeps growing," says Jarzebowski. "From the job seekers' perspective, there is clearly a need for accurate and quality job searches, as well as a need to receive auto alerts via email [for the jobs that match the Tiscali UK community criteria]. And, based on the current users' satisfaction, we expect many more job boards to use this type of targeted marketing where ad spend is more accurate."