Jason Goldbergs blogs on his “predictions for the future of online job advertising”:http://jobster.blogs.com/blog_dot_jobster_dot_com/2005/10/the_not_so_dist_2.html, predicting a shift from pay for posting to pay for performance, similar to what has happened in other areas of online advertising.

Job advertising is fundamentally different from other kinds of advertising, and requires a version of pay for performance that is technically much more sophisticated than simply counting clicks.

When you’re selling widgets, any customer’s money is good. Some percentage of clicks will statistically turn into customers, so pay per click is a decent proxy for pay for performance. By tuning the keywords it uses to sell its product, a company can maximize the conversion of clickthroughs to sales.

Jobs are totally different. Too many “buyers”– too many people inquring about the job– are a bad thing, not a good thing, especially if those applicants aren’t qualified for the job. There is a cost associated with rejecting applicants who aren’t a good fit for the company.

The challenge in the shift to a pay for performance model for job postings is that counting clicks isn’t enough– pay for performance means paying for qualified prospects. To do this successfully, a product needs to be able to predict and measure quality, a hard thing to do. It needs to be integrated into the processes and systems of companies recruiting department, so that it can successfully “close the loop” on pay for performance.

Companies spend a lot of time and money fighting resume spam and qualifying leads. The service that takes some of this load off of the company while preserving as much as possible of their existing systems and processes gets to claim a proportionate share of this spend.