Direct Costs of recruiting

This article surprised me:

Monster.com's basic rate is $395 per job posting, though it offers volume discounts. Companies also pay to search the resumes that applicants have posted. (Jobseekers can access the sites for free.) Considering that some Fortune 500 companies hire thousands of workers a year, even in tough times, the cost of listing all their open jobs can approach $1 million.

The article talks about the Direct Employers Association:

Bill Warren founded an early online job board in the 1990s, helped kick-start an industry and was president of Monster.com, one of the leading Internet career sites. But these days he's not very happy with the results.

So he's taking another crack at it, going after Monster, Career Builder and similar commercial job sites. Warren is starting a nonprofit job listing system that could lower the costs that employers pay to list positions and make the process easier and more fruitful for applicants.

... Warren, 68, says that those commercial sites charge employers so much to list openings that the companies don't post all their jobs – leaving potential applicants unaware of opportunities. Warren also believes that the sites push too much advertising on jobseekers and include too many "work at home" scam jobs.

... DirectEmployers' software will automatically code such listings to make them easily searchable by city or occupation. The association also will sort the listings in as many as 30,000 regional ".job" Web addresses it hopes to begin rolling out in March, such as "atlanta.jobs." That will help people search for jobs in specific places. The group hopes to add thousands of occupational domain names, such as "engineer.jobs," later this year.

Companies that belong to the association pay a $15,000 annual membership fee and will receive prominent placement on the ".jobs" Web sites. Smaller companies can purchase a ".jobs" domain name for about $125 a year and then post jobs for free. They can also work through their state employment agencies, which post jobs online at no charge.

At those prices, the new ".jobs" system could be another online innovation that undercuts what currently exists – much as the invention of job boards themselves undermined newspaper help-wanted ads.

In an age of Craigslist and listing on your own website, I would have expected that the rates would have been less than $100 per posting.