Applying the long tail concept to recruitment isn’t as far-fetched as some might think: that’s to say the idea of selling smaller volumes of hard-to-find products over large quantities of popular items. And here we explore how this can be applied to the jobs market.

As a starting point we take the success of online retailer Amazon – as used by Chris Anderson who coined the term ‘long tail’ in 2004. This is a clear example of how technology can lower the cost base of almost any business.

Amazon can supply an unlimited selection of books without being restricted by the physical shelf space of a traditional bookshop. It can offer the consumer a much wider choice at a fraction of the cost-of-sale faced by high street retailers – as they often cannot justify the cost of selling smaller numbers of specialist books. Amazon – alongside competitors Rhapsody and Play – is able to incorporate these niche products into its broader product base at little cost. Using technology it can turn smaller sales figures into a profit and the more available that obscure products become, the more the demand for those products grows. And hard-to-find books are now one of Amazon’s fastest growing revenue streams.

So, is Amazon merely tapping into an unmet demand? Or has the market been missing out on important sales because of the physical constraints of the traditional bookshop? And in asking this, the long tail example becomes relevant to the recruitment market. In the same way that a bookshelf operates within the boundaries of available space, a recruitment business is limited by its distribution channels.

An effective recruitment business relies on frequent fee generation (found in the red section of the diagram above). These fees must be sufficient to cover staffing costs and office overheads. And this undoubtedly restricts the business to recruitment markets where regular high value fees generate profit – cancelling out niche markets where demand remains untapped. Until now.

Rapid changes in technology and the unlimited capacity of the internet mean that businesses no longer need to concentrate on the few high value fees. Instead, the smaller niche transactions can generate profit right to the end of the long tail. There is a place for everyone online, and there is certainly a place for recruitment websites that offer better, quicker and more specialist job matches at lower cost.

With sophisticated technology-led filters in place, recruiters need not sort through CVs – and recruitment websites can learn something from Amazon’s ‘users who bought this also bought’ approach. This may not be good news for large generalist recruiters who rely on high volume, low margin business since they cannot compete with the quality and cost of smaller niche online products. And this is especially true in markets that were previously too small to justify setting up a consultancy or business.

What’s more, niche groups are popping up all over LinkedIn – such as Retail Data Architects and Information Management for Solvency II – which give people a voice and add value to job searches. And these searches will continue to splinter as online recruitment evolves. This may not be a new industry trend, yet it’s certainly something that hasn’t yet been used to its full potential. Niche online products may not replace specialist search and select services – or headhunting – in larger agencies, but they will open up smaller, more selective markets for the first time.