Na­tal­ie?Brig­gs

Ten years is a long time to be in busi­ness. Ten years ago, Face­book was still mak­ing its way around dorm rooms at Har­vard. Twit­ter wasn't even in ex­is­tence. And, at the time, hav­ing an on­line busi­ness pres­ence was still the ex­cep­tion rather than the rule in T&T.

Quot­ing a sta­tis­tic from a Bloomberg ar­ti­cle in Sep­tem­ber 2013, Forbes.com says eight out of 10 busi­ness in the US will fail with­in their first 18 months. In Ju­ly 2005, Caribbean­Jobs.com, a dig­i­tal re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­er, got its start. Ten years lat­er, it is do­ing a US$160,000 up­grade of its Web site and is cre­at­ing apps to ac­cess its ser­vices from an­droid and IOS smart­phones.

An in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­ny

Stu­art Shana­han, the com­pa­ny's man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, said Caribbean­Jobs bur­geon­ing suc­cess can be cred­it­ed to its peo­ple, its en­vi­ron­ment and its "de­vo­tion" to prod­uct.

"Once we get the per­son, we try to build an en­vi­ron­ment in which they can flour­ish and ex­cel. We al­so spend a lot of time en­sur­ing our prod­uct is as great as it can be. We have a 100-per­son group de­vel­op­ment team sit­ting across five coun­tries who are per­ma­nent­ly work­ing on im­prove­ments to our Web sites and de­liv­er­ing best in class plat­forms."

It would be on­ly nat­ur­al that Caribbean­Jobs re­lies so heav­i­ly on its peo­ple as the site's pur­pose is to help com­pa­nies and re­cruiters find the best tal­ent in any in­dus­try.

Caribbean­Jobs be­gan its life as part of Dig­i­cel own­er De­nis O'Brien's em­pire. O'Brien pur­chased Saon­group, an Irish re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­ing com­pa­ny re­spon­si­ble for Irishjobs.ie, in 1996.

"They (Saon­group) branched out and they went in­to the UK, Lux­em­bourg, South Africa, Chi­na, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean," re­count­ed Shana­han, who is Irish him­self.

"When De­nis O'Brien opened up Dig­i­cel in Ja­maica, see­ing the suc­cess he was hav­ing with IrishJobs, he de­cid­ed to repli­cate the mod­el and bring it to the Caribbean. When we came to the Caribbean in 2005, there was no on­line re­cruit­ment."

O'Brien then sold Saon­group to Step­Stone, a Ger­man re­cruit­ment com­pa­ny that em­ploys 1,600 peo­ple world­wide, in 2013. Step­Stone is a sub­sidiary of the Ax­el Springer me­dia group, which pub­lish­es The Bild, a news­pa­per with one of the high­est cir­cu­la­tions in Eu­rope.

Shana­han ex­plains the Eu­ro­pean group's for­ay in­to dig­i­tal re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Caribbean.

"They de­cid­ed they need­ed to get in­to dig­i­tal be­cause their print sales were de­clin­ing. They fo­cused on a few dif­fer­ent ar­eas in Eu­rope, clas­si­fieds, dig­i­tal clas­si­fieds, jobs and re­al es­tate. They made a few ac­qui­si­tions. One of them was Saon­group (ac­quired through Step­Stone), the com­pa­ny that set up Irishjobs and Caribbean­Jobs," he said.

Step­Stone aims to hold the top two po­si­tions in each dig­i­tal re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­ing mar­ket around the world.

And, ac­cord­ing to Shana­han, Caribbean­Jobs.com is well on its way to ce­ment­ing its place in the top spot in this re­gion.

What's dig­i­tal re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­ing?

Caribbean­Jobs does not re­cruit em­ploy­ees. Shana­han said it is a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion of the com­pa­ny's core prod­uct.

"When I say I work for Caribbean­Jobs, peo­ple of­ten ask if I can get them a job," joked Shana­han.

"That's not how it works. We sit in the mid­dle and we don't get in­volved with the re­cruit­ment of peo­ple."

What Caribbean­Jobs does pro­vide is the space for com­pa­nies and em­ploy­ment agen­cies to post job open­ings on the In­ter­net. Shana­han said they do busi­ness with most of this coun­try's em­ploy­ment agen­cies.

"We don't want to get in­to com­pe­ti­tion with them. They use the site, they use it well and they al­so bring con­tent to the site," said the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor.

Dig­i­tal re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­ing forms part of the Ax­el Springer group's clas­si­fied unit.

"That's the job ads, re­al es­tate. Caribbean­Jobs is a tiny piece of the clas­si­fied unit."

The oth­er busi­ness units are the paid and the mar­ket­ing units. In the paid unit rev­enues are earned through the group's print di­vi­sion, pri­mar­i­ly through pay­ing read­ers. The mar­ket­ing unit's rev­enues are earned from ad­ver­tis­ers on elec­tron­ic me­dia and web­sites.

Shana­han said he could not re­veal how much Caribbean­Jobs con­tributed to the group's over­all clas­si­fied rev­enues but told the Sun­day BG that for 2014, the group made �512 mil­lion through its clas­si­fied di­vi­sion.

On turn­ing ten

Shana­han said Caribbean­Jobs in­vest­ed �120,000 (US$160,000) to up­grade the com­pa­ny's Web site in De­cem­ber 2014.

He con­sid­ers this to be one of the com­pa­ny's key mile­stones.

"We had skins on the Web site be­fore, where you used the same plat­form, but dress it up a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. What we did in 2014 was so dif­fer­ent."

For the last month, the site has had 507,333 vis­i­tors per month, with 251, 967 of these be­ing unique vis­i­tors.

Shana­han said they ex­pect this num­ber to grow with the site's new fea­tures. The new site re­mem­bers vis­i­tors' pref­er­ences once they ac­cept the site's cook­ies on their ini­tial vis­it. Vis­i­tors can al­so se­lect an op­tion to have the site not dis­play jobs they are not in­ter­est­ed in.

Three years ago, 2012 Caribbean­Jobs launched its ed­u­ca­tion sec­tion. This part of the site gives job­seek­ers tips on re­sume writ­ing and in­ter­view­ing. The com­pa­ny has al­so part­nered with sev­er­al lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to ad­ver­tise their course of­fer­ings on the site.

Fur­ther up­grades are un­der­way to mark the com­pa­ny's tenth an­niver­sary, which oc­curs this month.

"We are con­tin­u­ing to in­vest in the Web site and so we are launch­ing a job app for job­seek­ers. That is com­ing out, hope­ful­ly with­in one month."

But the site will al­so be mak­ing it eas­i­er for em­ploy­ers to im­prove what Shana­han termed their "re­cruit­ment brand. Com­pa­nies that don't have a ca­reer sec­tion on their Web site can go to Caribbean­Jobs and post their job open­ing. We will al­low their IT de­part­ment to ac­cess a code, which will al­low the va­can­cy to show on the com­pa­ny's site as well.

"This means they can build a ca­reer sec­tion on their Web site which rep­re­sents their em­ploy­ment brand. I think that brand is so im­por­tant be­cause rep­re­sen­ta­tion of an em­ploy­ment brand al­so af­fects the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the over­all com­pa­ny brand. I think some com­pa­nies don't have a per­ma­nent em­ploy­ment brand and they don't do much to im­prove it."

Be­yond these ac­tiv­i­ties, the Caribbean­Jobs mar­ket­ing di­rec­tor said the com­pa­ny wants to deep­en its mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion in T&T, Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica, as well as es­tab­lish a pres­ence on oth­er is­lands across the re­gion.

"There is still a lot of room for growth in Trinidad and our oth­er mar­kets where we have our of­fices. I think the nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion would be to keep grow­ing in those mar­kets, but al­so look­ing at the oth­er mar­kets and set­ting up there. In our over­all group, this mar­ket is still un­der­de­vel­oped."

Shana­han said there was still some re­luc­tance among com­pa­nies in T&T to re­cruit staff on­line. But he ex­pect­ed that this would change. He said as the old­er gen­er­a­tion of man­agers leaves cor­po­rate life, they are be­ing re­placed by peo­ple who got their first job on­line.

"They would have made their way up through the years and would be look­ing for ways to stream­line process­es. One of these would be re­cruit­ing on­line," said Shana­han.

An al­liance be­tween Caribbean­Jobs and tra­di­tion­al me­dia is al­so not out­side the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty.

Shana­han said this is al­ready done in the group's oth­er mar­kets.

"In Ire­land at the mo­ment, we have a deal with the Irish In­de­pen­dent (news­pa­per). They don't even have a ca­reer sec­tion on their Web site any­more, they now di­rect peo­ple to IrishJobs. For us I think that is the big change ahead for us."

But he said the com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to fo­cus its core prod­uct.

"It will be busi­ness as usu­al. We are not go­ing to try and rein­vent the wheel or change di­rec­tion. We are go­ing to fo­cus on what we do. We do on­line re­cruit­ment ad­ver­tis­ing. We are re­al­ly good at it. And, we are go­ing to con­tin­ue to be re­al­ly good at it and re­al­ly push the bound­aries in that re­gard in de­vel­op­ment of the in­dus­try."