Ask IH: How should I monetize this platform?
https://www.showject.com
Ask IH: How should I monetize this platform?
Hi all,
I posted before about a place to showcase your resume files to your clients and/or employers. I'm running in a situation on how to monetize this product. At first, I thought a subscription may be the best choice but I thought to myself that would job seekers pay for this service? I'm not 100% now about this approach now. Then I thought of companies advertising jobs on the platform (maybe like PPC or just a generic job post).
I'm sort of confused now which approach is best for everyone?
Link: https://www.showject.com
I worked as a marketing assistant a few years ago, and I often had to post job listings on sites like Wayup and F6S. I remember these sites charging the companies posting the listings.
I’d like to think that companies typically are more willing to spend money on advertising and recruiting than job seekers are on searching for a job (but I could be wrong).
I would recommend the following options:
A freemium option for job seekers (for example, with the free version, they can upload 1 resume or some limited amount, but for a premium monthly fee, they can upload an unlimited amount — say they want to tweak their resume based on the company)
Charge companies by how many job listings they post. If you don’t want to create a job board, then maybe you could charge the company a monthly flat fee for using Showject.
Have a “Sponsors”/“Featured Companies” section on your landing page — and charge a company a monthly fee for being shown there (since this is another form of advertising for them).
Hope this helps somewhat, and best of luck!
Interesting ideas. Thank you for your comment.
That could be an ideal approach. Sounds sensible and affordable for all people.
I don't want to go down the route of integrating a job board service as there are several out there now. Can you tell me more (or provide an example) of what you mean about charging a flat monthly fee for using Showject?
Sponsorships can be great but how would one persuade a company to do that (especially a company that is on early stage)? I'm assuming this is a great approach when you get a good engaging audience.
Thanks.
No problem, and happy to help!
I mistakenly assumed that companies would have a Showject account where they could view all the resumes that were sent to them. I took a closer look at the site today, and I realize that’s not the case, as job seekers just send a Showject URL to the recruiter via email, etc. Ignore my earlier suggestion about charging companies a flat monthly fee.
I agree that this is a longer-term solution. Some possible ideas (just throwing them out there; have no idea if they’re any good) for persuading a company to do this in the early-ish stages:
a. Low cost for being a sponsor (it might help to research how much sponsorships cost on other sites and try to lowball them)
b. Put some “success” numbers on your landing page — “105 resumes created” (this may take some time of course as you gain users) — and testimonials. Like you said, if a company sees that people are actively using the site, they might be more inclined to advertise there.
c. On each Showject Profile page, you could have some sort of announcement message/popup saying, “Interested in being a Showject sponsor?” This takes them to a page about what they’d get out of being a sponsor:
1. Being presented on the front page
2. Maybe you have a newsletter/weekly email that you send to all Showject users. You could include the Sponsors + some job links posted on the Sponsors’ sites?
Not sure if that helps much, but good luck!
Make it more interactive and incentivized for your users.
Could you make some integrations with job portals, where you can fetch job posting and can submit candidates?
That way, when a user sees a job posting on your site, he feels like he applied via your website - but in the background - you take the url and send it as an application for that job. See if you can get some attributes from that url (should be possible as it's your database) and send the application to look more complete.
That way you are incentivising users to use your platform to create resume and apply for jobs on one screen.
Recruiters will get to see more applications featuring your URL and that could become a norm if some of them start liking it like a Linkedin resume.
If you can build such ecosystem around it - that's when your visitors n retention grows and you can start doing some paid job postings, freemium plans for users to create and apply seamlessly, update on the fly etc.
You can market it saying - "Submitted a resume and forgot to mention something? You can do it now - update on the fly and reflects at recruiters end"
Good suggestion here. You don't create a resume, you upload a resume (if that makes sense). I'm guessing I will need the API from different job board services.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago