Job Board Widget Review: JobTonic.com

May 19, 2008

JobTonic launched onto the scene in early 2007 with a unique referral recruit approach. The company picked up the NORA innovation award in 2007 and relaunched its job board at the beginning of the year. As a job board which has engineered its business around the referral model, you’d expect its widget (which is essentially a traffic referral tool) to stand out from the crowd. So does it?

Features

When it comes to functionality JobTonic’s widget comes close to ticking all of our criteria boxes. The tool allows a publisher to select job type, location, distinguish between full and part-time roles and to define keywords.

We were surprised to find publishers are unable to specify a salary range for the roles displayed in the widget. This seems a relatively simple feature to include, particularly as the functionality is available from within the job board’s advanced search.

JobTonic Job Board Widget - Features
Monetary Incentive /Reward	Sign Up Process	Category or Sector Selection	Job Type	Location	Salary	Keywords	Easy Integration	Simple Customisation

Given JobTonic’s reward based revenue model it’s no shock that the company rewards sites who utilise their widget, if only on a pay-per-action model. At the current time publishers are awarded 75 pence (1.45 US dollars) for traffic that leads to a user registering for an account and 5% of any referral reward for jobs found via the publisher’s site. The reward scheme means publishers must sign-up for an account prior to using the widget.

Where the JobTonic widget really shines is at the implementation and configuration stage. A publisher has a great deal of control over how the widget looks when it is displayed on their site. The title, font, colours and width can be easily defined from variables that are available at the top of the widget script. The customisations that are permitted have obviously been well thought out; publishers have the ability to assign different styles to different visual elements (for example a different font for titles and links).

However, some may find the benefits of the customisation are slightly negated by the over-powering JobTonic logo at the bottom of the widget. Web standard purists may also be concerned to see JobTonic’s widget does not pass an xhtml validation, but this is a minor issue (a misplaced break tag in the JavaScript), which can be easily corrected.

Summary

The excellent customisation options of the JobTonic widget are impressive and are well ahead of the majority of the competition. The company’s reward scheme makes it an attractive option for those looking for an additional revenue driver. Some publishers may be deterred by JobTonic’s relatively low advert inventory (just over 500 jobs at the time of this review) and the site’s lack of coverage in some sectors.

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	Pros:			Cons:
	Reward scheme			Low advert inventory
	Excellent customisation options			No salary range

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Next job board widget review: Telegraph Jobs - coming soon

Job Board Widget Review: AllTheTopBananas

April 16, 2008

AllTheTopBananas is one of those brands that’s impossible to dislike. The name says it all: bouncy, energetic and not too serious. It’s a young site and full of innovation, so it comes as no surprise that it was one of the earliest sites to release a job widget. Just one of the reasons why it’s the first widget we’ll be reviewing.

Features

The job widget from AllTheTopBananas is not the most feature full of those we’ve seen, as the table below indicates, but the site does an excellent job with the features it supports. The keyword search is extremely powerful and allowing a user to specify the town and radius of the location improves the geographic targeting greatly.

AllTheTopBananas Job Board Widget - Features
Monetary Incentive /Reward	Sign Up Process	Category or Sector Selection	Job Type	Location	Salary	Keywords	Easy Integration	Simple Customisation

However, the lack of job type and sector selection in the set-up process was disappointing. In addition, forcing users through a sign-up process feels like a rather unnecessary step, particularly as there is no reward or monetary incentive for users to implement the widget.

We experienced a minor technical difficulty during the implementation, but this was quickly resolved by the company’s technical team. The great customer service we received underlines that AllTheTopBananas is taking support for its product range seriously, a good sign.

Given the yellow colour scheme of the widget the absence of a simple customisation method is a double-edged sword. For those publishers wanting to hook into the AllTheTopBananas brand the strength of the colour is no problem; while those focused more on the job content may find it just too overpowering for their site.

Summary

The AllTheTopBananas widget matches the company’s brand perfectly and those looking for a bright and lively display advertising solution need look no further. Those wishing to integrate job content seamlessly into their site or looking for remuneration for the traffic they deliver may wish to explore other options.

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	Pros:			Cons:
	Excellent location search			No ability to specify job type, sector or salary range
	Fantastic customer service & support			No reward or monetary incentive for publishers
	Good for publishers wanting to buy into the AllTheTopBananas brand			Lack of easy customisation

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Next job board widget review: JobTonic - coming soon

Job Board Widget Reviews

March 30, 2008

Over the next few weeks we will be embarking on an investigation into the job board widget, by taking a look at a range of widgets offered by UK job boards. We will present the pros and cons of each widget, finishing up with a comparison of all the widgets we’ve reviewed.

Before we do our first review, we thought we’d use this post to recap exactly what a widget is (in the job board sense) and the aspects we’ll be looking at.

What is a widget?

For those of you new to the world of Internet advertising (or those who have been living in Outer Mongolia for the last year - lucky you) the term widget refers to a section of a web page containing content provided by another site.

In the online recruitment world this usually means a job board providing the ability for other web sites to display their job ads. For example, the widget on the right is JobTonic’s widget implemented in this blog.

Why Would A Publisher Put A Widget On Their Site?

There are essentially three different motivations for publishers or users to put a widget on their site:

+ Money: Always a key motivator, some widget owners pay people who implement the widget money based on specific conditions. For example a click through rate or a fee for bringing a certain number of new registered users to the site.
+ Content: Some widgets provide content that the publisher just has to have on their site. For job board widgets this almost always means job content, the more relevant the better.
+ Branding: Some job boards have a great brand and as a result publishers are keen to be associated with that brand. In such cases, publishers, particularly bloggers, will implement the widget without the need for any financial reward.

Job Board Widget Criteria

We’ve look at a range of UK based job board widgets and established a set of criteria to measure widgets against, as follows:

Sign Up Process

Does the job board force the publisher to sign up or register before they can implement the widget? If so, how easy is the process? Forcing a publisher to register can restrict a widget’s growth as many people just don’t want to register to yet another account. On the plus side, registration is absolutely essential if a job board is offering a reward or payment based upon widget activity. So sign-up can be a pro and a con.

Category or Sector Selection

Does the widget set-up process allow the user to restrict the jobs that are shown to a specific category or industry sector? This is important as people implementing the widget want the content displayed to be relevant to their site’s audience.

Job Type

Does the widget set-up process allow the publisher to select the type of job roles displayed, for example permanent, contact and part time? As with the category, job type helps keep the content relevant to the site the widget is displayed on.

Location

Can the user pick one or more locations for job ads that are displayed? Location is an important aspect for many sites that have a local user base. If a job board wants to reach local audiences, giving a publisher the ability to restrict content to specific areas or towns is important.

Salary

Does the widget set-up process allow a salary to be specified?. Again this is important to allow publishers to match the job advert content to the demographic make up of their audience.

Keywords

Perhaps the most important field that a job board widget can support is the keyword field. Keywords allow the publisher to define unique search criteria that are very specific to their audience. For example a blog that focuses on online recruitment could use the phrase ‘online recruitment’ and be sure that only those adverts containing that phrase are displayed on their site. Once again relevance is the key.

Integration

How easy is it to integrate the widget into an existing site? We’ll be using a WordPress 2.3 blog as our target site for all of the widgets we review.

Configuration

Job boards who produce widgets often miss this area, but allowing the publisher to modify the look and feel of a widget can be very important. Web site owners spend a lot of money ensuring that the right look and feel is achieved on a site, so asking them to implement a bright purple job board widget may not be well received.

Summary

So there we have it, the criteria we perceive that all job board widgets should be measured against. Coming soon, our first widget review.

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© Scott Maxwell | Dreamstime.com

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