HiddenNetwork

In my 2.5 years in online recruiting, I haven't seen much that has made me say "cool", or "that seems like it would really work".

I came across a company today though that has me saying both -- HiddenNetwork.

Our CEO, Marc, gives a presentation that talks about the power of blogs as a great source of recruitment advertising. Now a company has gone and created a business around this idea.

In a nutshell, you purchase job postings through HiddenNetwork which then blasts those ads out to dedicated space they've negotiated with certain blogs. Why might this work? Well, if you are reading, for example, Haacked, you would see a variety of Tech jobs (programmers, etc.). Getting this real estate on some highly trafficked blogs means HiddenNetwork is putting your jobs in front of an audience that may or may not be looking for a job at the moment -- the so-called "passive" job seeker. HiddenNetwork also designs a branded job board for each blog.

Their success depends on HiddenNetworks' ability to negotiate ad space on highly trafficked blogs (which may sound easy, but some popular blogs like Gawker and Techcrunch either have job search provided by 3rd parties or their own job board) and, of course, a variety of desirable jobs. One advantage is that they don't need to do any marketing to the job seeker -- their partner blogs take care of that traffic. I haven't dug in that deeply yet, but I would assume, like other ad networks, the blog has the ability to accept of reject the postings. I'm also interested in the revenue share between HiddenNetwork and the blog. Is it a straight split for the ad real estate? PPC? Based on the number of jobs posted? And would I, as an employer, have the choice of which blogs I wanted to advertise (or not) on?

Interesting questions, but kudos to HiddenNetwork for thinking outside the box on this one!