Month: May 2017

Great article from Forbes on Google for Jobs.

Several billions of dollars are spent on job advertising (Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and others compete for this market) and even after people apply, companies on average spend approximately $4,000 per candidate on interviewing, scheduling, and assessment to decide if someone is right for a job. We estimate that the entire recruitment market is over $200 billion worldwide, and nearly every employer is a participant.

Companies like Indeed, Glassdoor, and Dice have long made money off of the large total addressable market (TAM) for jobsearch. Interesting these companies pay massive sums to Google for ad placement in attempts to rank higher than each other for various queries.

Google walks a fine line with these companies and their search ad spend. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, but I expect a big shift to come to online job search ecosystem.

The capability, which Google unveiled this week, allows the company to connect the dots between the ads that it shows its users and what they end up actually buying. This is a crucial link for Google’s business that, for all of the company’s inventiveness, remains a matter of attracting users to its predominantly free services, collecting user data, and leveraging that data to sell advertising.

This squarely fits into Google’s mission of organizing the world’s data. Omni-channel ROI tracking is a tough nut for marketers to crack. Google certainly has many opportunities with this additional data added to their user ad profiles, and certainly that data is valuable.

Google has been making huge investments with the development of it’s 360 Suite of business intelligence products. Even just looking at the top level navigation on the 360 Suite product page: Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize, Data Studio, Surveys, Attribution, Audience Center.

Google has long since moved past just organizing data for the sake of Google Search, it’s now helping companies connect the dots between customers and revenue, and doing it in a way where Google can be a company’s one stop shop end-to-end.

Run by billionaire Zhou Yahui, Beijing Kunlun is one of China’s largest game developers. The purchase of Grindr, which has more than 3 million daily users, will put it in a more strategic position internationally.

‘Sex sells’ has always been a marketing mantra, I find humor seeing that hold true in technology. I also find humor that a game developer is buying an online hookup app, as if dating wasn’t enough of a game already swiping, taping, hearting, liking seemingly endless digital profiles.

What’s curious to me is the 2.6x Cost per percentage point growth between the early 2016 and present day acquisition of Beijing Kunlun’s purchase.

In January 2016 Beijing Kunlun Tech acquired 61.5% of the gay social-network app for $93 million. It’s now announced plans to purchase the remaining 38.5% stake in Grindr LLC for $152 million, according to Reuters.

 

This leads me to wonder, what strategy does Beijing Kunlun have here? How would Grindr’s user base react knowing their intimate data is being shared with a Chinese corporation. China doesn’t exactly have a great track record with LGTBQ rights.

Update: a bit more commentary on intent from a South China Morning Post article:

A little-known Chinese tech company has agreed to pay US$240 million for America’s Grindr so that it can become fully involved in the daily operations of the world’s largest gay social media app, as it expands and builds a loyal user base beyond China.

“[With the deal,] we also aim to be a world leading social media company in the future, and to expand our platforms into film, streaming and animation,” it said.

When you turn on Travel Mode, every vault will be removed from your devices except for the ones marked “safe for travel.” All it takes is a single click to travel with confidence.

Increasing public fears of digital asset searches (particularly while traveling) have arisen since Trump’s ‘extreme vetting’ executive order earlier this year. While Trump’s order is still currently stayed by courts, fears have not diminished. Fantastic to see a product company like Agile Bits go out of their way to support their customer’s fears. It’s clear 1Password is in touch with it’s user base. I’ve been using 1Password for years as my primary password store, and swear by it. I’ve tried many password managers over the years, 1Password is the only one I have stuck with.

Update: I didn’t anticipate the press coverage that this feature would generate. Strategic feature addition resulting in great positive media coverage for AgileBits. Smart.

In a few weeks, Google will begin to recognize when U.S. users are typing job search queries into Google Search, and will then highlight jobs that match the query. However, Google is not necessarily taking on traditional job search service providers with this launch – instead, it’s partnering with them.

Google already knows a ton of information about you in your ad profile. For many of us, Google is first to know the question on our mind, the websites we visit, the emails we receive, even our calendars. Put all this together and I think Google has more than enough information to provide you fantastic and highly relevant job recommendations.

Consider the fact that most employers communicate job application status via email these days, and now you’ve got the magic bullet for tracking hire rates. The recruiting industry has largely moved away from more traditional CPC models and towards cost per hire as the leading metric for both success and ROI.

Google also owns the Search engine results pages (SERPs), so for many Job Search Engines, a job seeker is never even going to hit their web property once Google launches. The recruiting industry has started shifting away from traditional job search models towards more head-hunter focused solutions like Hired or Indeed Prime.

The company said that Google for Jobs will initially partner with LinkedIn, Facebook, Careerbuilder Monster, Glassdoor, and other services.

Notice any company missing from that list? Indeed.

If I were Indeed, I’d be scared. Having previously worked at Indeed, I can say the primary web job search engine was always described as, ‘google for jobs’. I’d say that phrase is likely no longer uttered in the halls of Indeed.

I sent this tweet to a few of my previous colleagues at Indeed on the heels of this announcement:

@hyams @donaldwysocki @TomBergman https://t.co/HtoTTDbirL pic.twitter.com/XSv4SqINqQ

— Taylor McCaslin (@digital_SaaS) May 18, 2017