The online job board market here in New Zealand is set to get more congested than Auckland’s Southern Motorway at rush hour any time of day.
As mentioned last week NZME are set to launch their new job board YUDU next year in a bid to challenge the dominance of SEEK and Trade Me Jobs. This week we were told by Stuff.co.nz that Fairfax would be launching the UK-based job aggregator Adzuna in New Zealand too.
It seems like we may be about to enter a media-fueled job board war in 2018. The YUDU announcement was made in the NZ Herald (owned by NZME) whilst the Adzuna announcement was made on Stuff (owned by Fairfax) and it seems likely these media giants are preparing to square up for a play at this lucrative market.
The timing from Fairfax is interesting too. When they initially partnered up with Adzuna in Australia back in 2014, New Zealand was not part of the deal, and they said:
“New Zealand is a different market, but as always we stay close to developments in Australia and will continue to assess them for applicability here in New Zealand,”
That was nearly four years ago. And yet less than a week after NZME’s announcement, their rival decides that this is the right time to make their move into New Zealand. The funny thing is, it’s actually pretty hard to decipher exactly what their time-frames and strategy for this move might be, simply saying that:
“For now the site is being run from Australia but Watson said he hoped to hire five or six people working in New Zealand over the next 12 months.”
All sounds a little bit knee jerk to me but, like I said last week, I’ll happily back, support and use Adzuna if it gets results. Until now my only knowledge of Adzuna was as a curious option on our Broadbean account to automatically upload our job ads there. I’m pretty sure we never did, but then as a job aggregator (scraping jobs off the web onto their own site) then maybe our ads have appeared there anyway.
I’m almost certain we’ve never had a worthwhile applicant though. Perhaps some Australian readers can shed some light on the efficacy of Adzuna to generate decent candidates.
Of course the claims are the same as made by NZME last week, that through their size and reach they will be able to generate those venerated purple unicorns – the passive candidates. In reality this is the only thing they can say to have any chance of attracting advertisers to the site, but the proof will be in the pudding come this time next year.
What’s for sure, there’s going to be a lot of money thrown at this next year. You recruiters will be offered lots of free job listings while these new players fight to grab the attention of the jobseeker market. SEEK and Trade Me Jobs will, I imagine, remain as interested bystanders waiting to see which one is left standing, if either.
