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NZME Wade Into Online Job Board Market

By November 2, 20173 Comments

New Zealand employers and recruiters will soon have another new jobs platform to add to their sourcing channels.  Well, that at least is what NZME will be hoping, as they announced yesterday the upcoming launch of YUDU, a job listings website with some extra padding like “industry-specific news, practical advice and tips, trends and insights for both employers and job candidates, as well as information on events within each industry.”

Sounds to me like a carbon copy of established players SEEK and Trade Me Jobs with some extra bumpf thrown in to try and differentiate itself.

What is very clear from its branding, language, and annoying text-speak company name is that they are hoping to attract millennial job seekers to register on the site.  They also have a snazzy video too:

YUDU vid

We’re all scrambling around trying to find candidates for our clients and of course a place to locate passive millennial job seekers would be absolute gold, but I sincerely hope NZME are going into this with the right level of commitment to make it work.

SEEK’s dominance in Australia remains unchecked despite massive pushes from Indeed and LinkedIn and the futility of local competitors trying to topple them is best summed up by the bizarre death throes of Career One.

Here in New Zealand Trade Me have at least made a fist of things competing with SEEK and making the market a bit more competitive but their Jobs platform has at this stage a bit less functionality, relying upon the huge numbers of kiwi visitors to their main auction platform to leverage eyeballs towards the jobs pages.

job pages

This is NZME’s key advantage.  They already have the visitors, and no doubt the tools to profile them for advertising purposes, but nobody is going to bother advertising jobs on there if there are no candidates responding.  Their first challenge will be to get the job seekers onto the platform.  The next will be to enable advertisers to actively search profiles and access profiled job seekers, otherwise I can’t see how they can viably compete with the services already provided by SEEK and LinkedIn.

Getting to that point will require patience, perseverance, and a huge amount of investment.  This, though, are not traits typically associated with media businesses, as witnessed by Fairfax’s surprise sale of Trade Me five years ago.

Competition is good for business and I wish NZME well with this new venture, but I hope they have the stomach for one hell of a fight.

Jonathan Rice

MD at New Zealand rec-to-rec firm Rice Consulting and co-founder of on-demand recruiter offering Joyn. Recruitment agitator and frustrated idealist, father of two, husband of one, and lover of all things Arsenal and crafty beer.

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