Westfield joins the job board industry

[kevinh]

On Monday this week Westfield launched a new job board called "Jobs in Retail" (JIR) www.jobsinretail.com.au .

The site is “powered by MyCareer” who are also managing the site, and promoting it to employers – but NOT apparently to recruitment firms! (according to one prominent retail recruitment specialist).

There doesn’t appear to be any pricing on the JIR site, and it says “Retailers wanting to advertise jobs on Jobs in Retail should register by contacting MyCareer Customer Service”.

Assuming retailers won’t advertise on both JIR and MyCareer, the price of advertising on JIR must be higher than a typical MyCareer ad, otherwise it wouldn’t make commercial sense for MyCareer, given they will be sharing the revenue with Westfield.

The site has plenty of job ads on it, mostly originating from recruiters but pre dating the site launch, so presumably they have just copied jobs from the MyCareer site, but not all of them – there are still 3-4 times the number of retail ads on the MyCareer site.

Incidentally, the phone is answered as “Jobs in Retail” but the operators seem to have access to MyCareer’s database, despite the fact that JIR is owned by Westfield!

It would be interesting to know where the initiative for JIR came from – Westfield or MyCareer. I can understand why MyCareer would spin off a niche job board from their main site but I can’t understand why they would do it for Westfield.

At the end of the day, there is now yet another place where retail job seekers need to look for jobs …

[cam]

The first impression I get when viewing this site (with my job seeker cap on) is that I have limited opportunities in regard the job options available as the locations are limited to shopping centres that I presume are owned by Westfield. This would be why they have the limited transfer of content from the mycareer site.

Apart from the fact that the site is branded as being Westfield it really seems like a bad idea to limit content, working at a Westfield shopping centre really isn't a big enough drawcard to warrent it's segregation from the rest of the retailers. If I were a job seeker I'd want somewhere that would maximise MY options in MY area, your dream part time job could be at the golf shop across the road from Southland but you wouldn't know it at this site.

I would be guessing the initiative came from Westfield over MyCareer. The only value I can see is their brand being banged out in the minds of job seekers navigating the site. Really I can't see anything else. And there's no way any other retailer (outside of Westfield shopping centres) would want to touch it (if they were allowed) unless of course the site gets extreme seek style traffic which I can't see happening.