THE dot.coms may be returning to their mining roots with their tails between their legs, but at least one area of IT is attracting attention as it records some success against traditional players – online recruitment.
Perth-based Diamond Management is not only convinced that online recruitment advertising is a growth area, it also believes that WA has been left behind as job vacancies are increasingly advertised on the Net.
Into this apparent void Diamond is preparing to launch WestJobs, a WA-specific job site aiming to capture market from national new media groups like seek.com and traditional players like The West Australian newspaper.
Using a technology platform created by BigRedSky, WestJobs plans to offer a parochial site which will be able to offer clients automatic candidate filtering to prioritise applicants.
Diamond managing director Neil McCormack said his company
had long been focused on finding ways of automating processes in the human resources field.
Mr McCormack said his company had committed to spend $600,000 on the technology and had enough working capital to get the model up from mid-March and run for at least three months.
Diamond was looking to raise about $750,000 for almost half the company during the first 12 months of operations.
In the first six months it expects to spend about $1 million in development, partly covered by revenue.
Mr McCormack said WestJobs did not plan to emulate seek.com’s huge pro-motional launch, which included television advertising featuring failed entrepreneur Alan Bond.
He said radio host Gary Shannon would be the face of the new operation, which he hoped could capture 10 per cent of the total WA market.
“It is very much WA-based,” Mr McCormack said.
“It is very parochial, that will be the look and feel.”
Internet advertising is dominating press by volume and appears to be having a significant impact on the classifieds market.
Diamond’s research had found that WA-based jobs represented just 3-5 per cent of all online vacancies advertised.
Compared to the usual 8-12 percent of job ads overall, the low Net figure suggested there was an opportunity for local players.
BigRedSky managing director Gavin Burnett said the site would offer filtering features which were not available on rival sites, but additional functionality would cost clients more.
