With 8.2 million Americans looking for jobs, Jeff Testerman isn’t worried about losing his. He’s co-founder of brokerhunter.com, a job site for the insurance and securities industries that features affiliate links to everything from resume writing to trade journals.

“Hiring started to pick back up in the last quarter. ” Hiring is definitely in the forefront now and in the future,” Testerman says with confidence, and he may be right. Analysts predict the first quarter of 2005 will be the best time for job-related Web sites, with some predicting growth of up to 15 percent.

Jupiter Research found that online job postings accounted for $923 million in revenue in 2003, and it expects revenue will climb to $1.1 billion for 2004. And a wide variety of job sites are offering affiliate programs, including the big three: Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

In the struggle to be No. 1, both CareerBuilder and HotJobs are revamping their affiliate programs, adding new benefits and promotions for affiliates to drive traffic their way instead. It’s a good move, considering the underlying level of power that affiliates – a virtual salesforce of thousands – can have on a company’s bottom line. To compete, less recognized sites are strengthening the additional services they provide to job seekers, most of which offer additional commissions back to affiliates.

Beneath it all, a new type of online job search strategy is emerging. A few sites are offering all-in-one service: Job seekers post their resumes there, and the site will use its advanced technology to almost instantly repost the resumes, in correct format, to every related job site, corporate recruiting site or job board out there. Consequently, it’s never been a better time to be a job-search-site affiliate.

“I’ve seen our network grow from 60 partners in February 2000 to more than 1,500 Web sites that drive traffic through Commission Junction (CJ) and another 400 integrated partners that we have today,” says Amado Izaguirre, CareerBuilder’s vice president of affiliate partners. Some of those 1,500, he said, are making more than $10,000 per month. “We have created an environment on CareerBuilder .com and all our affiliate sites that encourage users to search for jobs and apply online without having to register on the site or deposit a resume into a database,” Izaguirre says. “We want users to concentrate on finding the best jobs. In turn, our affiliates benefit because CareerBuilder users are encouraged to perform the activities that they are compensated on.”

Through CJ, CareerBuilder pays 50 cents on applications rather than resumes; job seekers can send as many applications, for free, as they like. Affiliates are paid $1 for job alert sign-ups, $50 for one job posting and $175 for four. They can also post any article the company owns, like ones on writing great resumes, top interview mistakes, coping with a bad boss, starting a job search or managing your career. CareerBuilder also occasionally runs special affiliate promotions.

HotJobs, meanwhile, has seen double-digit percentage increases in resume postings each year. “I think we’re going to be the big one when the dust settles, because we’re the only one that is wholly owned by one of the biggest brands in the country and one of the leaders in search,” says Marc Karasu, HotJobs’ vice president of marketing. Its new union with Yahoo gives it a big leg up in the name recognition department: HotJobs is featured in an “Inside Yahoo” box above the paid listings on a job-related Yahoo search.

Ads Trumped

HotJobs is also doing a lot of conventional advertising these days: from TV ads to billboards. In September it launched a two-season co-branding campaign with The Apprentice, the hit career television show featuring Donald Trump. Applications and behind-the-scenes footage can be found at the HotJobs site, and fired contestants get into a HotJobs-branded cab at the end of each episode. Cabs sporting HotJobs toppers have also rolled into service in eight urban areas: New York, Miami, Washington, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

“We’re thinking of ways to pull parts of our affiliate program into The Apprentice promotion,” Karasu says. HotJobs pays $1 for resume postings and pays $50 for employer job postings. It’s now focusing on building strategic affiliate relationships with sites that are focused on health care, information technology and human resources.

Despite losing its planned purchase of HotJobs to Yahoo, Monster.com has retained the top position among job search sites. It offers worldwide job search capabilities, centered around Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America, and boasts more than 490 of the Fortune 500 companies as clients. Of the big three, Monster.com has the most commissionable items. It pays $50 for job postings, $1 for resume postings, 70 cents for Monster Networking Accounts and $15 for Networking VIP membership, all through CJ.

Then there are those sites that aren’t yet a household name but provide solid services and have good affiliate programs. There’s FlipDog (encroaching on the big three), SoloGig, Brass Ring, Jobvertise, Job.com, Vault, Freelance Work Exchange, The Ad Net, Employment911 and many others with products and commissions across the board. FlipDog, which searches corporate sites and claims it has “five times more employers each week than other job sources do in a year,” pays 50 cents only for visitors creating a FlipDog.com membership.

Jobvertise.com, on the other hand, focuses on employer listings. “Turn your Web site into an instant community jobs board and charge others to post jobs to it!” it pushes on its site. “Anyone browsing your Web site can enter job and credit card information for instant authorization – the jobs are automatically posted on your Web site.” Affiliates decide how much they will charge users. Jobvertise handles the entire transaction and, once total commissions top $50, cuts quarterly checks for 50 percent of the total revenue.

Employment911 has perhaps the widest selection of commissionable career-related services. It started as a small, 5,000-circulation magazine for employers in 1997 and moved to the Web later that year. Today it’s still a homespun site, but its internal software gives Employment911 the searching and resume posting capability to make it one of the largest job posting networks online, pooling from 7,000 employer Web sites and employer-industry-specific news groups. So, although it’s not a Monster, it does provide strong services for job seekers and employers. Affiliates are paid between 12.5 and 25 percent, based on volume, for job seekers buying its resume writing services, resume distribution service or resume blasting tool. They also receive a payment per job posting and 25 to 50 cents per resume posting lead. “Web people are earning substantial revenues just by promoting our resume posting,” says owner Jake Fannin. Employment911 also has free job search articles for posting and an HTML job search box that can be put right on an affiliate’s site. Searches not only cover Employment911, but also 21 other sites, including the big three.

“Anyone who has a small amount of traffic, of any type of targeted market, should receive at least $100,” Fannin says. Employment911 has 5,000 affiliates and counting. Its top affiliates have earned more than $5,000 a month, and up to $9,000. “Those are people that have a real targeted audience, they have prominent links or they’re in a co-branded relationship with us.” Employment911 affiliate BrokerHunter.com, for instance, generally pulls 30 cents or more per click.

Job Securities

Recently voted by TopJobSite.com as the No. 1 securities industry job site in the US, BrokerHunter.com runs its own insurance and security industry job list with 40,000 job seekers and a couple of thousand job postings from security and insurance companies all over the US. Its affiliate income then, comes from auxiliary services, like Employment911’s resume writing. It promotes resume writing in a bann
er at the bottom of its home page, and includes a pitch for the service in its monthly newsletter to 70,000 insurance industry job seekers (its 40,000 members plus 30,000 more that have come to the site and opted in). “The services go hand in hand,” says Testerman, from BrokerHunter. “We’re such a niche job board, that it’s really of benefit to the job seekers out there. Being able to put their skills effectively in a resume is why this is such a good fit.”

There’s also the new breed of job search sites that don’t post jobs at all. Instead, they send users’ resumes to the sites that do. “ResumeRabbit will post your resume to over 100 job boards,” says Lee Marc, president of ResumeRabbit parent company eDirect Publishing. “If you’re looking for a job, you probably should put your resume on Monster.com, HotJobs, CareerBuilder and a hundred other Web sites that employers and recruiters search every day to find candidates. What ResumeRabbit does is one-stop resume posting to 100 career sites.” ResumeRabbit.com pays $20 for every order.

What sites benefit most from this type of service? “Clearly sites that are catering to job seekers are a natural fit,” Marc says. “However, we find that there are a lot of sites on a variety of topics that seem to promote ResumeRabbit solely because there are a lot of people in the world that are looking for a job or are unhappy with their current one.” It’s posted more than 1 million resumes for more than 100,000 time-crunched job seekers since 1999. “And they’re all real happy,” Marc says. Interested in email or longer copy? Just ask for it. ResumeRabbit has 3,000 affiliates through CJ, and consistently ranks in the top three for CJ’s career category commission in terms of revenue per click.

Insiders say that it’s fairly easy to make the most of job site affiliate programs. After all, nearly everyone who visits any Web site is a potential user. CareerBuilder’s stats show that 2 percent of a site’s front door traffic will engage in some sort of career activity, if it’s offered and if the banner is at “the top of the fold.” “Above the fold” was once a newspaper-only term, describing the part of the first page that’s seen at newsstands. It now holds true online as well. If you want conversions, make the job search option one of the first things site visitors see. HotJobs even suggests an L rack or “monster-sized” banner.

Productive affiliates send confirmation emails to job seekers, outlining merchant offerings they may have missed at the site. And they have a dedicated following of visitors loyal to their cause, employment related or not. “The more niche you can carve out for yourself, the more successful you become,” Testerman says. The best sites are industry-specific sites, focused on nursing, accounting, IT or any variety of professional topics. Those easily convert, say insiders, with just the addition of a “Career” page with an article on finding careers in that profession and a link to a tracking merchant site. But even general sites can tap into the 2 percent conversions by adding a career section.

When it comes to creatives in this industry, “banners alone don’t work,” Fannin says. Instead, draw users in with articles provided by merchants or job seeker testimonials, and convert using text links. “This provides content for search engine optimization and provides the best possible method for sales and conversion rates,” Fannin says. Affiliates who do the best take the time to study their merchant’s sites to really understand the product – it doesn’t take much time – and find a way to describe it in their own words for their own audience.

While many people are looking for jobs around the country, many people are also looking for a job around the block. Research from Belden Associates found that 65 percent of job seekers check their local newspaper sites, while only 55 percent hit Monster.com. Hence, the industry is responding by “going local.” Yahoo’s new Local product, in beta testing, will roll out HotJobs postings specific to a city or region. Other programs are expected to follow.

The online market for job-related services is going strong, and some would say it’s booming. Merchants and affiliates are starting to think long term. Rather than focusing solely on short-term metrics such as clickthroughs, registrations and purchases, they’re tracking long-term metrics such as predictive behavior, referrals and branding. This should play out as increased traffic and better conversions for affiliates. In the interim, the big three – Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder – will continue to fight it out to be the biggest job site out there. With Yahoo’s HotJobs scooping up top search engine placements, one might ask if there will be room for new entrants. “There is absolutely room for new entrants,” says Karasu at HotJobs, which doesn’t prohibit its affiliates from buying search words in its category.

And analysts predict further consolidation among the second-tier sites. “In the meantime,” says Fannin at Employment911, “we’ll just continue to try to produce good results.” It’s a motto echoed throughout the burgeoning online job search market, and one that will serve affiliates well.

JENNIFER MEACHAM is a freelance writer who has worked for The Seattle Times, The Columbian, Vancouver Business Journal and Emerging Business magazine. She lives in Portland, Ore.