How do Jobs Search Portals Make Money

I have been surfing on the web for many reasons and have always found that job portals and matrimony websites keep advertising heavily everywhere and iam unable to find out how these companies make money. Is it through the pay per click ads which they have on their websites or is it through some other medium, can you explain me – Venkatesh

Ans – We have been discussing how job portals make money and a friend asked me how can we start a small Jobs or Employment related blog or a small Jobs Board and monetize it. This is a question which has numerous answers and it depends on the way you select to monetize from your website because the options are numerous. And as your income progresses, the need to monitor, organize, and manage your finances becomes increasingly more important. In fact, a bevy of online tools can be found here. Lets discuss on some of the well known ways of making money by building Jobs related websites.

I had read somewhere recently that 88% of Naukri.com’s revenue comes from recruitment products and the balance 12% comes from their network of websites. Websites like Naukri.com were not started big initially with the plans started in a garage and then serious dedication to the project made it a hit. Read the complete article on how the CEO of InfoEdge(Naukri.com) – Sanjeev Bikhchandani made his first million

Recently Info Edge had launched a new portal called First Naukri with a very small investment of 12 lakhs INR offering the Employers some special services and tools for finding employees. The portal is launched for connecting first time job seekers and campuses to potential employers. Since they have the complete backend ready with complete contacts of Employees they wont have any problems getting sales to their new ventures with the same sales teams. Lets get back to the point how these online job companies make money through their websites.

You would have seen many many job portals online which keep offering you with a lot of free stuff like free registrations, free resume submissions and free email or SMS alerts, but did you ever know how these companies make money? Well its like a simple business – They try to build & gain as many members they can by doing heavy advertising and publicity online and offline and tell all these members to get members. Here are a few links which can help you understand how this system works.

Check out Monster.com Naukri.com or CareerBuilder

Now on this website you will find 2 kind of sections –
Employee Section – This is where you can join as a free member and upload your professional resume and start searching for your jobs and also like your resume on this portal.
Employer Section – This is where the employers search for the best employees whom they hire based on their professional skills, experiance etc.

Most of these Jobs Portal make money from the Employers , once they have received a big number of employees database under their hand. Most companies sell you different kind of services which you as a employer can opt in when you are searching for talented professionals. Here are the few options they offer you –

• Advertise Your Job – You have a Job Opening in your company and you want to advertise your job, contact these job portals and they would list your job openings on their homepages or sidebar which get huge number of visitors views. You have a option to list your job openings on multiple categories along with a lot of options. These companies offer you job listings with 30 days & 60 days listing charges with prices ranging from 100$-1000$, based on the city and the number of jobs already available in those locations. Posting a Global Job would mean that you can target global audience and get applications from all over the world with costs touching 2000$ for one time listing.
• Resume Search – Under this option you as a employer can start searching different results and compare them before contacting the job applicants directly. If you go for a Job Posting option you can get applications ranging with different options and it can get untargetted but when you are selecting the Resume Search option you can select targetted applications with your selected criteria like Age, experience, technical knowledge, career background etc and then sort out all the
  applications who fill under this and directly contact them with a invitation for a job Interview. This way you can stay away from all those applications who just apply for your job posting without any real intention to join and just giving a try while seeing your listings.
• Email Newsletters – The job companies have big number of email databases of all the applicants, hence if you are having a big number of openings you can contact these companies and they can send a email to all their applicants for meeting at your Interview location. This way you can get huge number of audience at the location but getting the best out of these is not possible always.

With all the above listed ways, these job portals make money from their websites and for making all this run they need to have a huge database of job applicants , because if they dont have the right database their business wont be running. This is the very reason all the job websites go for very high advertising all over and ask all their visitors to signup for free membership accounts and get their dream jobs because they work like middlemen between the people who are looking for new jobs and people who are looking for employers. Many job portals are Public Limited Companies now with huge success and lot of money they have already made through these ventures is already invested back into many new projects. If you have a very good budget with backup money through Venture Capitalists then you can also setup a new jobs portal and get started!