By Sharon Hill

Local classified publishers yearning to help area hiring managers fill hard-to-fill positions and meet EEO compliance have a new resource. The just-launched CareerCast.com niche networks from Adicio not only provide a highly-targeted, probably better-qualified audience for employers’ job listings but might also help Adicio newspaper and job-site publishers increase their recruitment advertising revenue.  Even non-Adicio clients can participate by way of feeds.

While many more are in the works, the four niche networks now live on
CareerCast.com are Diversity & Bilingual, Green, Healthcare and Nursing. Publishers pay Adicio $20 for each socially-shareable ad upsold into each network. (Yes, an ad can post to more than one niche). While CareerCast recommends a retail price of $99 a niche, each media client is free to price what its ad managers feel the market will bear.

Targeting candidates through niche networks is important to hiring managers and publishers both, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal general classified manager Chelle Bize.

“We’ve been with the CareerCast National Network for awhile,” she told us by email. “Two weeks ago we added the Bilingual Network…We also added its Specialty Nursing Network because healthcare has become so specific when it comes to job titles. There was definitely a need for bilingual candidates and critical care/extended care nursing in this market.”

Each niche network ad is branded to the site that sold it, and its detail page links back to additional job postings on the publisher’s site. Both are a continuation of CareerCast’s commitment to deliver traffic and marketing to its participating publishers at no cost.

“When a job-seeker comes to CareerCast.com to look for an administrative job in Seattle, the site sends that seeker to the online database of The Seattle Times,” Adicio chief alliance officer Tony Lee told us. “If that job-seeker wants to apply and creates a resume, that resume goes into the Times database; the same with any job alerts visitors set up. If an employer clicks on the employer tab to post a job, our filter shows all of the logical posting options. It then allows the recruiter to narrow down to the right ones and post right to that media client’s e-commerce platform. The chosen publisher then gets the revenue.”

While there are many recruitment networks, CareerCast’s new niches have several differentiators. Perhaps most crucial: advertisers get a “digital tearsheet” — an automated email with PDF of the ad, as well as detailed reports on response.

Lee addressed a common job network flaw:  “A publisher, association or TV site will upsell into a network and their clients have no proof that the job even ran there,” he said. “We had [newspaper] clients who were selling into other networks and had to have an admin spend her time searching for the job, taking screenshots and sending emails. We decided we had to automate it.”

Niche networks aren’t the only innovations for three-year-old CareerCast.com, whose parent Adicio has had an exceptionally positive year.

“We’re doing well,” Lee told us. “Last year job-posting activity was tough for everybody but it really started to show improvement in October. Since then it’s been terrific. Our business has really been growing.”

According to Lee, the bulk of new Adicio media clients are smaller publishers who want to own their own market.  He told us about the many new and upgraded Adicio products to help them do just that.

Free mobile platforms and SEO-optimized faceted search are now live on every Adicio-powered site, for instance. Additionally, job seekers can now pay to assure they’re front-and-center in search results and spotlighted candidate widgets, and the 2011 integration of social media into every Adicio-powered site in careers, real estate and motors is about to evolve yet again. Soon Adicio-client publishers will be able to post their advertisers’ listings on the publisher’s and employer’s Facebook pages.

Adicio’s new pay-per-candidate resume-database search was created to deliver fresher candidates to employer advertisers, and revitalize what had been a poor revenue stream for some sites. Until now, many publishers had been selling monthly access to their entire resume database; but, employers paid once, downloaded all they needed and often didn’t return for about a year. With the new pay-per-candidate approach, any hiring manager can view any resume, though the candidate remains anonymous.  A flat fee provides contact information to that one resume. Better still, the Adicio resume-matching service hones in on the CVs of those candidates who have said they’re interested in the job.

“We’ve had resume matching for a long time,” said Lee. “The way it used to work — and the way it still works at Monster, CareerBuilder and RealMatch — is the employer posts a job and {the site] says, ‘Would you like to see the ten resumes that most closely match this job? Here they are.’”

The problem with that approach, according to Lee, is that the candidate who posted the resume might have already found a job, moved or even retired. So, Adicio is proactively reaching out to qualified candidates for posted positions; then, they only deliver to employers who pay for the service those candidates who say yes, please, tell that employer I’d like to talk.

“We can send them five, ten or more candidates — whatever number the client wants,” said Lee. “Now every candidate we deliver is one that has responded that they are interested.”

Clients attest to the revenue and traffic-inducing value of CareerCast’s innovation and other vertical-specific products from Adicio, via written and video testimonial at Adicio.com. Here you can view a powerful video message from two classified executives of The San Diego Union-Tribune’s SignonSanDiego.com.