As a small number of companies, including the big job search engines, prepare to spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads this Sunday, I’m pondering a few questions about the search engines’ ad campaigns:
1. Are most jobseekers as miserable as CareerBuilder and Monster portray them to be — or is there something Freudian going on here? Maybe the truly miserable ones are the advertising agency creatives who can’t come up with a better reason to use the typical job board than, “You’re so desperate and unhappy — try us!” Of course, the idea that you could find relief from misery by searching for jobs online is a little ironic to us. RiseSmart customers come to us specifically because searching for jobs online makes them miserable.
2. What is it with TheLadders.com and CareerBuilder and the use of animals (and even monsters — yes, I get the joke) in place of actual people in their commercials? To paraphrase John Merrick, you are not an animal! You are a person, and chances are, your professional yearnings and desires are far more personal, and more important to you, than these ads — playing for laughs — would suggest. That’s why RiseSmart’s service is human-powered — with a real HR professional engaged in every job search on our customers’ behalf.
3. Is it really effective for TheLadders.com to work your ego so transparently? “We only work with the big talent,” the ad says. From what I can gather, as long as you plunk your money down, you’re in. Now, what they don’t bother to tell you in this ad is that they only have a small fraction of available $100K jobs on their site — because they charge employers to post listings. That’s the kind of exclusivity that can cost you a job — not find you one.
So as I sit back and watch Super Bowl XLIII on Sunday, I’ll take satisfaction in knowing that while the big search engines are offering jobseekers intangible benefits like a relief from misery or a stroke of the ego, we continue to focus on delivering what our customers want most: a job.
The sentence with the typo: “You’ve earned a better a job search.”
The blogger goes on to say:
The ad itself I really like, if only because it immediately calls out my major frustration of job sites like monster.com and even more targeted ones like talentzoo. I spend most of my time wading through crap before finding … a job I might be interested in..
Which to us goes to the real problem with the ad (and with TheLadders), compared to what RiseSmart offers jobseekers.
TheLadders takes half-measures to address the frustrations of looking for jobs online. Specifically, it restricts the number of openings it makes accessible to members – typically only 70,000 active job listings.
That solution reduces the number of jobs members must sort through, but it does so in an arbitrary, rather than personalized, manner. And TheLadders still requires its subscribers to search manually through job listings.
Watch this video for the first real solution to the $100K+ jobs dilemma:
Advertising Age reports that a new campaign for TheLadders.com “paints category leaders CareerBuilder and Monster as overrun with unattractive commoners.”
Ad Age goes on to say:
TheLadders’ tone is markedly different from that of CareerBuilder and Monster, which have tended to focus on job seekers’ unhappiness at their current workplaces…
The exclusive, country-club attitude befits TheLadders’ business model. Unlike the larger and better-known jobs sites, it costs $180 a year (or $30 a month) to use and restricts membership and listings to “$100k+ people looking for $100k+ jobs.”
While we’re not big fans of the elitist tone of the TheLadders’ ads, we do agree that $100K+ jobseekers are frustrated with most job sites and are looking for something better. Finding a the right six-figure job opportunity among the millions of listings online is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
TheLadders’ solution to this problem is to restrict the number of jobs it makes available to members. Its database typically consists of about 70,000 active job listings.
That solution reduces the number of jobs members must sort through, but it still forces them to search manually through job listings. And it greatly reduces the pool of possible jobs.
At RiseSmart, we think we’ve found a better solution for the $100K+ jobseeker:
We start with a database of more than a million active job listings — not 70,000.
Then, we take our members’ profile information and match it against this million-job database to produce a preliminary list of job results.
Finally, a RiseSmart Concierge — a real human being assigned to each member’s account — plucks only the most precise matches from this list.
That means our members gain the benefit of a more comprehensive search than TheLadders provides, but without having to search at all. You can leave that to your RiseSmart Concierge.
That’s why at RiseSmart we don’t just tell you you’re special — we show you you’re special by offering a level of service unavailable anywhere else.
Advertising Age reports that a
