What a year of job ads costs, and what switching changes

Job advertising almost never gets added up. It goes out one role at a time, on somebody's card, and no single invoice is big enough to have an argument about. The annual figure exists, but it is spread across a year of small charges and most people running a business have genuinely never seen it in one place.

Before you read the rest of this, go and find what you spent on advertising last financial year. Everything below is easier to judge with your own number sitting in front of you.

We are not going to print anyone else's rate card here. Prices move, plans get bundled, and you know what you paid better than we do.

Per advert pricing has one flaw

An advert costs what it costs. It costs the same whether the role pays $24 an hour for six weeks or $120,000 a year. It costs the same whether you fill it on the Tuesday or run it twice and give up.

Which means the cost follows how often you hire, not what the hire is worth to you. Two things follow from that, and both of them land hardest on the roles at the bottom of the pay scale.

• A store assistant advert and a general manager advert cost the same money. One of them is a lot easier to justify at the end of the month than the other.
• Roles that churn come back. The same casual, seasonal or entry level seat gets advertised two or three times a year, and gets paid for each time. That is one seat and three purchases of the same ad.

For an agency the same shape shows up as margin. Advertising costs what it costs whether the fee at the end is four figures or five, so on a six week temp placement the ad is a real slice of what you keep, and on a desk running a lot of those roles it is the same slice, over and over, all year.

Work out your own number

Put your rate in. The figures below start as an example and are not a claim about what anyone charges, so change both boxes to whatever your last invoice actually says.

Two honest caveats on that. The difference row measures against a paid plan rather than against free, because free would make every saving look like the whole bill and that is only true if your roles go up one at a time. And free does mean one live listing at a time. If you need four roles up at once in March, free will not do it and Pro or Unlimited will. The maths is still worth doing, because for a lot of small businesses hiring is one role at a time anyway, and one at a time is exactly what the free plan is.

What the same year costs here

Every plan carries your logo and company profile, and every plan gets the hiring brief on every applicant. You are paying for volume and placement, never for the brief.

Recruitment agencies post free

Agency accounts are unlimited and cost nothing. No card, no contract, no minimum, no exclusivity, and listings run 30 days. Agency listings are not featured, which is the trade: the featured row stays with the businesses paying for it. Sign up at findmeajob.co.nz/recruiters and it is set up from the start.

Worth saying plainly why it is free rather than leaving it to look like a trap. The board is new and is being built candidate first, we want good roles on it, and the accounts that come in early will get plenty of notice if that ever changes. Revenue comes from featured placement and the monthly plan.

The cost that never reaches the invoice

Advertising is the part you can see. Screening is the part nobody costs for, and on entry level roles it is the bigger number of the two. A pile of applications comes in, a good share of them cannot start, cannot get there, or have not read the ad, and somebody on your team reads all of them anyway.

Here, each application arrives as a one page brief written against your own ad, before anyone opens a CV.

• A verdict of Interview, Maybe or Skip, with the reasoning under it.
• Skills matched and skills missing, counted against what your ad asked for.
• A line on New Zealand context where it matters, such as work rights, NZ qualifications or how far they are from the site.
• Two or three interview questions written for this CV against this ad, specific enough to ask word for word on a fifteen minute phone screen.
• Shortlist or Skip in one click from the email itself, with no login and no portal.

The candidate hears back either way, automatically, which is the part every job seeker in the country complains about and the part that quietly costs you your reputation as an employer. The brief and the verdict stay with you and are never shown to the candidate.

What quality means on these roles

Quality is worth defining before anyone claims it. On an entry level role you are not buying a track record, because there is not one to buy. You are buying whether somebody can start, can get there, will still be there in three months, and can be trained into the job.

So that is what the brief is pointed at, and it is the honest answer to what you get for the money.

Who is actually on this board: people with up to about two years of work experience, including none at all. That takes in someone holding a certificate, a degree, a licence or a ticket with very little work history behind it. A role that asks for a forklift ticket, a Site Safe card, first aid, a Class 2, a food safety or barista certificate is a fine fit here. The qualification is not the problem, the missing decade behind it is the thing other boards are not built for.

A few things we can say about what arrives, and they are all things we control rather than things we hope for.

• Every applicant holds an account with a verified email, and the name on the application comes off that account rather than off the form, so an application cannot be filed under somebody else's name.
• Right to work is declared on the way in. If your ad says citizen or resident only, an applicant needing sponsorship or on a student visa cannot file it at all. Anything softer than that is let through and shown to you, because a dropdown is a blunt instrument and a mis-click should not cost someone a job they can lawfully do.
• Where they are is stated as well, with a quiet note beside it if the application came in from outside New Zealand. Being overseas blocks nobody, since a Kiwi in Sydney who can start next month is a real candidate, but you get to see it rather than find out in week two.
• On trades roles they can declare their tickets and registrations, and the brief weighs them instead of leaving you to spot them in a CV.
• Every application is scored against the ad you wrote, not against a generic template.
• Every listing is reviewed before it goes live, usually within 24 hours, and once your NZBN is verified your listings go live straight away.
• Every role is submitted to Google Jobs at no extra cost, so it turns up in Google search as well as on the board, and roles get shared on our social channels.
• The job seeker side is free, all of it. CV scoring, job matching, interview practice and the rest, at no cost and no catch, which is the reason people are on the board at all. Our CV and cover letter builder is listed on Tahatu, the Government's Career Navigator, if you want something you can go and check without taking our word for it.

What we will not do is put a number on the candidate pool. We do not publish how many people are registered and we are not going to imply a figure, because the only honest promise a job board can make is about what happens to your role and your applications, never about how many people will answer.

Where this board is the wrong answer

A senior specialist with eight years behind them is not on here, and an ad for one would sit and do nothing. Executive search, hard to find technical hires, anything where the whole job is finding the twelve people in the country who can do it: keep paying whoever finds those people for you. Refusing the work we cannot do is the fastest way to be believed about the work we can.

Switching without actually switching

Nothing here asks you to cancel anything. This is a channel to add, and the real objection to a new board is almost never the price, it is that you have already paid for advertising this year and it is sitting there whether you use it or not. Adding this does not touch those credits.

If you run JobAdder, we are a partner job board inside it. Nothing to install, no second login, no account to create. Pick FindMeAJob from your board list and post the way you post to any other board. Ads come across each morning and applications come back into JobAdder against that ad, with the CV, the cover letter and the hiring brief attached.

If you do not, paste an ad you already have running somewhere else into our posting page and the form fills itself in. Title, location, pay, description. Check it, post it, and you are done in about two minutes. Posting by hand does need a free employer account, which takes about two minutes to set up the first time and never again.

Then leave it a month and compare. Not our numbers against theirs, your invoice against your own.