By: Karim Mostafa Latest Version Puts Listings In Employers' Hands
This isn't your typical jobs site. It's more of a marketplace
connecting buyers and sellers.
That's how General Manager Mary Moslander views
WashingtonJobs.com, the career site of Washingtonpost.Newsweek
Interactive (WPNI), which recently unveiled Release 2.5.
Moslander, also a vice president at WPNI, orchestrated a complete
strategy shift for The Washington Post's online employment
classifieds.
The 33-year-old Internet veteran made sure the new site enables
employers to list, edit, and manage job listings themselves. And
job seekers who registered for e-mail notification will get an
alert when a new job listing matches the criteria they set when
registering on WashingtonJobs.com. When job listings are posted
by noon on a weekday, WashingtonJobs.com guarantees the new
listing will be online by 5 p.m.
WashingtonJobs.com generated $10 million in revenue in 2000 and
11 million page views a month - a 120% increase from the
previous year. "We're going to grow a lot," Moslander said. "For
this quarter, we're seeing growth."
Needless to say, the industry is watching this site closely as it
collides head-on with competition from national brands such as
Monster.com and HotJobs.com.
Charlene Li, research director at Forrester Research in
Cambridge, Mass., said that WashingtonJobs.com definitely makes
the short-list among employers in the D.C. market, in part
because WPNI has put considerable resources behind promoting the
site as a separate online destination throughout the local
market. "They've been doing a lot of promotion in the local
arena," said Li. "I think it's a very smart thing to do."
"We do spend a lot of time promoting Washingtonjobs.com," said
Amy Wease, a WPNI spokesperson. "But always as part of the
washingtonpost.com network." WPNI does not breakout its
advertising campaign expenditures.
Li said that WashingtonJobs.com also attracts employers' ads
through its local cross-promotion in both print and online. The
employment section of the Post features the
WashingtonJobs.com logo on the front page with a description of
what can be found at the site. Content is also exchanged between
print and online.
From the beginning
Like many newspaper companies, WPNI initially invested in
CareerPath to create a national career site out of employment
classifieds from newspapers across the country. But CareerPath
floundered, only to be bought by Tribune Co. and Knight Ridder
and merged with CareerBuilder. WPNI decided to launch its own
plan that had already been in the works.
As early as the summer of 1999, WashingtonJobs.com sought a local
company for outsourcing its data-hosting. From its relationship
with CareerPath, WashingtonJobs.com knew that it didn't want to
be stuck sending its data to a third party that could only update
the site once a week.
WashingtonJobs.com also added technology to its site. A 1997
investment in Junglee Corp. by parent Washington Post Co. gave
the online career site the opportunity to utilize technology that
was ultimately acquired by Amazon.com. Junglee created
applications that query data from a variety of types of data
sources - such as corporate Web sites - and then
gather, structure, and integrate it into highly targeted
relational databases. This gave WashingtonJobs.com the ability to
combine its classified listings with automatic updates from long-
term clients' Web sites that listed job openings.
When Amazon.com bought Junglee, Washingtonjobs.com switched to
Zycus Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., to provide the technology for
pulling job listings off of clients' Web sites.
By January 2000, the company had solidified its strategy.
WashingtonJobs.com wanted to own all its own data. The site also
wanted to be able to listen to its market, so it did focus group
studies and online usability studies. As part of the Post Co.,
the site had the advantage of building on long-term relationships
that print classifieds had already built with local recruiters.
An in-house job
In July 2000, Release 2.0 was unveiled. Moslander said this
version was a fundamentally different product from what preceded
it. With the help of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting),
WashingtonJobs.com built the new system from the ground up,
making it a place where employers could list their jobs in a
variety of ways with updates three times a week.
The system for posting jobs was built entirely in-house, said
Moslander. And even though the industry was buzzing about
upselling classifieds from print, WashingtonJobs.com had 90% of
its job listings originating from online postings. Only 10% of
the site's classifieds database was upsold from the Post's
print classifieds. However, sales representatives for the
Post and WashingtonJobs.com do work closely together,
Moslander said.
Release 2.0 also targeted the job seeker. WashingtonJobs.com
allows workers to set up search agents that check the job
listings every night and sends e-mail if there are any matches.
The resume database allows users to post up to three resumes and
a cover letter. It even includes instructions on how to write a
resume. And finally, a job seeker can exclude his name, but
include his experience if he's worried about a boss finding the
resume.
Li said that WPNI paid a handsome sum for all of this technology
from Accenture - well into the six figures, maybe more. She
acknowledges that most newspapers can't afford to build
technology like this from the ground up. "My inclination is to
outsource it." But Li said the important thing with outsourcing
is that the brand must be the newspaper's so that cross-promotion
between print and online can occur. In her opinion, that's where
CareerPath and newspapers went wrong.
Beyond ads
Classified ads and resumes alone don't make a jobs site.
Moslander said other content is what facilitates the transaction.
Users responded to focus groups and said, "Connect us to the
right decision-makers." Hence, WashingtonJobs.com offers Live
Online discussions with Washington Post advice columnists
Carrie Johnson, Amy Joyce, and Kenneth Bredemeier, and local
specialists, including the assistant director of Georgetown
University Career Center.
With content for the Washington, D.C. market, WashingtonJobs.com
focuses a lot of content around government, military, and high-
tech careers. They also target all age groups, from college
interns to retiring executives, with both original online content
and Washington Post content.
And WashingtonJobs.com organizes listings with the local
institutional knowledge that only a newspaper can have. National
competitors breakdown the regions in ways that don't make sense
to local inhabitants, Moslander said. For her, the key to success
is how well WashingtonJobs.com knows the intricacies of its
communities.
Karim Mostafa (kmostafa@editorandpublisher.com) is associate editor for E&P Online.
Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.
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