Beef Central’s recruitment page, ‘Jobs Central’, continues to attract high levels of traffic from website readers and subscribers to the free daily email alert.

But is the platform yet developed to the stage where it can claim to be an effective medium for businesses across the beef industry supply chain to source high quality staff?

We’ll let readers be the judge, based on this case study:

Stockyard Beef, one of Australia’s best known grainfed beef brand programs, advertised last year on Beef Central for a General Manager of Feedlot Operations, to replace Jim Cudmore, the immediate past President of the Australian Lot Feeders Association, who retired to pursue other interests.

“We placed ads in weekly rural newspapers nationally, as well as on the Seek employment website, at considerable expense,” said Stockyard Beef’s chief executive, Lachie Hart.

“In total we received five responses. Four of those came directly from Beef Central, and they were the best four, that we chose to interview,” he said.

Effectively, the Beef Central advertisement attracted four times the number of applicants than Stockyard’s other, much more expensive print advertising.

Furthermore the candidate ultimately chosen for the job was directly sourced from Beef Central – and he was located in Western Australia at the time, demonstrating the nationwide reach of the Beef Central platform.

“By any standards, our recruitment ad on Beef Central was extremely cost-effective,” Mr Hart said.

Assisting Stockyard Beef in seeking its new general manager, feedlot operations was Brisbane-based boutique recruitment consultancy, Kelly Howard Recruitment.

Ms Howard said the campaign involved spending ‘quite a bit’ of money advertising in print media – various state-based agricultural weeklies – as well as listings on dedicated jobs website, Seek.

“It’s not uncommon in placements like this to get quite a lot of lesser quality candidates, but with this particular campaign, all we got was quality responses. It was spot-on,” she said.

 “We often use jobs websites like Seek, which attract huge traffic, but they tend to be very, very general. But for a position like this, which is highly industry-specific, I can see a lot of value in a highly-targeted website like Beef Central, that fills an industry niche in advertising.”     

“In this case, Beef Central certainly hit the mark in terms of what our client was looking for,” she said.

• Click here to place a recruitment ad with Beef Central, or learn more about what's involved 
• Click here to view latest Jobs Central listings