Behold the Seek behemouth

After my last blog, bemoaning the state of the Australian media landscape when a few big fat media zeppelins dominate the market, thought I'd share a thought on how this looks in reality.

(I've put this stat at the end of this post, so if you're here for the numbers, scroll to the bottom.)

I met with Seek today, who were promoting a new agency product that allows advertisers to benchmark their jobs against the market. That is, if you're a big name in engineering, are your jobs performing above or below the market average when it comes to 'summary' views, job views and applications.

Agencies like mine work closely with Seek, so you'll excuse me while I take my tongue firmly out of my cheek and talk about this seriously for a while.

This is a great opportunity for innovative advertising agencies like ours to talk to our clients. Not necessarily about getting our clients to use Seek more strategically or buy more Seek products. It's all about showing them how they can be more effective as advertisers - here's some ideas for job posters, ranging from the minute to the magnificent.

If your jobs perform below average:

• Have you got the classification right?
• Have you filled out all datafields?
• Have you posted your salary? (big effect, this one.)
• Have you made your offer clear from the word go, so people read the ad?
• Does your copy make the application process and the employment 'deal' clear?
• Is your copy written well? (and by that I mean by a trained professional who understands your audience, not just your organisation.)
• Does your ad look visually appealing or, at the least, professional?
• Does your ad match the way you want your employer brand to be percieved in the marketplace? (or does grammar not matter any more online?)
• Is your employer brand incorrectly* percieved in the marketplace, putting off the right candidates?

(*I use the word 'incorrectly' on purpose. After all, some perceptions could be negative, such as the idea that your people work really long hours. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if the idea matches the reality - after all, you will then attract people who get the deal beforehand and will therefore be more likely to stay.)

Most of this stuff above is really simple, tactical stuff - the icing on the cake of employer branding, if you will. I'd much rather be having conversations about how organisations can be more proactive in their attraction and retention of the right people, long-term.

But equally, the reality is many of our clients aren't proactive or strategic, and they self-post on Seek, with the standard necessarily variable. So it's worth thinking about the basics every once in a while.

Now coming back to the whole point of this post, Seek gave us some figures from June '09 that demonstrate their market dominance. If you bear in mind their two biggest competitors (CareerOne and MyCareer) are probably choices two and three in Australia, you'll see why the Australian landscape really lacks choice for the discerning employment marketer.

• In June '09 Seek had 2.5m UBs
• 2.9x more than CareerOne (0.8m)
• 5.1x more than MyCareer (0.5m).