History of Job Search, Newspapers

Prior to information being free, ubiquitous, and liquid, it was costly, shepherded, and structured. The contours of information availability, like those of a topographic map, radiated outwards from geographic centers of production. Printing presses were large, immobile, and based in cities. The newspapers they produced were perishable, costly to ship, and the value of local news content to the audience decreased with each mile distant from the source. In a sense, the information available to you was tied to the land upon which you lived.

Although limiting, these costs and geographic considerations were the reason that large, professionally-written, locally-focused newspapers were viable as businesses. By contrast, neither one-man bands nor a nationally distributed paper such as USA Today were economically feasible until very recent times.

The history of newspapers is the history of mass-produced information being shared among burgeoning urban populations. The business history of newspapers is the combination of fetching content — items of local interest produced by a staff of increasingly professionalized journalists — with the revenue sources to finance operations — primarily advertising, which was priced to reflect the growing value of reaching those teeming throngs of eyeballs in the ever-expanding cities. And while these limitations restricted comprehensive local news to the newspaper medium until the Internet Age, they also helped structure the business practices around recruitment advertising, and therefore recruiting and the job search itself.

Newspapers reigned as the preeminent method for recruitment advertising for a century and a half. For our purposes, we’ll establish the somewhat arbitrary datelines of the New York Times’ founding in 1851 and the appearance of Monster.com’s seminal 1999 Superbowl ad “When I Grow Up” (HotJobs appeared also, a wonderful story that’s ripe for telling on another day) as the beginning and end points of the newspaper’s supremacy. Radio, TV and general interest magazines never produced the right combination of cost vs. audience composition to make them effective recruitment advertising vehicles (a small, but notable, exception is the trade magazine, with its focused subscriber base; but “trade rags” lacked the scale to secure significant market share.)

In Benjamin Franklin’s time, newspaper production was small scale and had hardly changed in 300 years. “Language aside, Gutenberg would hardly have felt out of place in the print shop of an American newspaper or book publisher, as all printing continued to be done on a flat bed of type, which was inked by hand using a padded leather ball, then overlaid with a sheet of paper, before the pressure was applied by a flat metal platen,” according to Dan Kirklin. High costs of production led to high subscription prices, and consequently an audience composed of the wealthy and the elite. If you’ve ever wondered about the provenance of those shared newspapers — nicely spindled and displayed on a wooden rack — in coffee houses, upscale hotel lobbies and your public library, the practice dates back to these times when sharing the costly news of the day with your clientele was a great way to generate business.

In the 19th century, one small advance after the other improved the speed, increased the volume and reduced the price of newspapers. Lithography, stereotype presses, steam-powered printing machines, and web-fed newsprint all contributed to making the “penny press” available to readers of every income level. From 31 newspapers published in the Thirteen Colonies in 1775, the number of newspapers exploded to over 1200 published in the United States in 1835.

By the mid-19th century, newspapers took their modern form. The New York Times, as mentioned, was founded in 1851; the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1841, the Baltimore Sun in 1837, the Chicago Tribune in 1847, and the Associated Press in 1848. The power of the newspapers, and their Editors-in-Chief, is perhaps best exemplified by Horace “Go west, young man” Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, who used his position at the top of the leading paper of its day to run against Ulysses Grant for President in 1872 (the strain of the loss, unfortunately, led to the demise of his wife, and a few weeks after the election, Greeley’s as well.)

With this rise in reader interest, publishing power, and distribution, newspapers came to be funded primarily by advertising and newsstand sales; subscription revenue has represented a steadily decreasing percentage of newspaper receipts for the past 150 years. As disposable income and earning power grew among the American workforce, their value as an audience increased as well. The proliferation of consumer goods and choices for entertainment, purchase and employment, led to an increasing premium on capturing their attention and effectively persuading them.

Among the most valuable advertising, in terms of pricing, and therefore, in terms of value delivered to customers, was that of the local classified ads section. Advertising the sale of your car, the availability of a home for purchase, or, in our case, an open position for hire, provided a means for those who had no viable alternative to spread their mass message more effectively than the media of window signs, word of mouth, or handbills.

And of those classified ads, help-wanted ads were the most profitable. While employment advertising revenue accounted for 17% of revenue, it contributed a disproportionate share of the operating profit. If we presume that the market was efficient, this implies that the value to employers of securing the next addition to their workforce was high, and the available substitutes were limited.

From a market structure standpoint, newspapers were local information monopolies that were geographically circumscribed, and in larger markets, demographically segmented.

Local information monopolies. As the sole means for effectively broadcasting a message to a community, newspapers dominated the business of providing information and advertising to their readership. Taken as a whole, a particular city’s newspapers represented the sole means for mass communication of an open position. And while there was occasion for price competition, particularly when the typical household subscribed, as they did in the 1930s, to 1.3 newspapers, the impact never translated into pricing help-wanted advertising at anything close to the cost of production.)

Geographically circumscribed. By dint of audience interest, subject matter, newspaper weight and their consequent high cost of shipping, newspapers did not travel far from their source of origin. You would have been hard-pressed to find the Cincinnati Enquirer for sale on Seattle newsstands, or to discover the Boston Globe served with your morning coffee at a San Francisco diner.

Demographically segmented. Most metropolitan markets supported more than one newspaper throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. (This is why my brothers and I labored over the assembling of the now defunct Buffalo Courier-Express on Sunday mornings until that paper lost its fight with Warren Buffet’s Buffalo News for predominance. Hint to the kids: don’t base the source of your allowance money on a business competing with Berkshire Hathaway.) As cities grew, newspapers gravitated to addressing differing niches among the population. This remains the case in New York City today, with the profile of the audiences of the New York Post, the Daily News, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal differing in education, political sympathies, and topical interest.

From these characteristics arise the nature of recruitment ads themselves. Help-wanted advertising was the most expensive advertising space, per square inch, in your local paper. As hinted at above, newspapers were able to price to the value delivered to the client, not to the cost of manufacture. It turns out that one of the most valuable things a medium could do for employers in a local community, attracting local talent to work at their local enterprises, was providing a consistently produced, universally known, culturally accepted venue for local workers to read those solicitations. This is a particularly salient feature, and one we will revisit later — the value to companies of attracting its workers is, indeed, extremely high. (Hence the arrival in the 20th century of specialists, called executive search consultants, who would charge up to 1/3 of first year’s pay to attract the right person for your job.)

From a product perspective, the high prices charged maximized revenue to the newspapers, while severely hampering the utility to the customers – both job-seekers and hiring companies alike.

High prices discouraged long-term display. Advertising packages might include one appearance in the Sunday paper and one during a weekday. In 2001, for example, the price for a single 2-inch long ad in the Sunday New York Times ad cost $2,000, or one-quarter million dollars on a full-page basis. These single-day appearances meant higher advertising costs for companies that needed longer exposure, and required a certain alacrity on the part of the potential employee. The chance for missed matches was high as the timing of an ad would need to be coincident with the timing of the candidate’s job search. A week’s deviation on either’s part would cause both to lose the opportunity.
Further, these high prices led to a strange vocabulary; space was at a premium, as the cost-per-character could exceed $1. Ads were priced by the ‘agate line’ (1/14″ by one column in width, therefore 14 agate lines per column inch — think stock price tables, not the typical text on the front page of a newspaper) and the more information one could stuff into a line, the lower the overall cost of the ad. Those of you over 40 will be familiar with truncated abbreviations such as: bkgd (background), exc (excellent), mfr (manufacturer), req (required), and so on. (Come to think of it, they probably seem familiar to you under-40 texters as well. LOL.)

As the Sunday paper had a special place in newspaper publishing — the day of man’s rest called for an enormous compilation and recounting of all the week’s events — the recruitment advertising cycle revolved around the publishing week and particularly the production of this weekly focal point. Ads had to be called or sent in, typically by 5 p.m. on Thursday. The thick Sunday help-wanted section kicked off the job-search week for candidates and employers alike. Monday was the highest trafficked day as job-seekers would appear at the employer’s door with resume in hand.

(It’s interesting to note how behavior has changed over the past decade as online recruiting has grown ascendant. At HotJobs in 2000 – 2002, the highest job-seeker traffic days were still Monday, and the highest recruiter traffic days were Fridays. During the past 7 years at TheLadders, we’ve seen job-seeker behavior shift slowly to the point where Tuesday is now a slightly larger traffic day. And companies and recruiter’s attention is highest on Wednesday. It’s taken just a decade for the artificial constraints of the 20th century behavior patterns to adjust.)

Significantly, compared to what’s coming up ahead in our story — the tidal wave of information, audience and access made possible by the internet — the purposefully stunted language of newspaper ads meant that no brand message could be communicated, no recitation of the benefits and trade-offs of the workplace, no elaboration of company culture or the attributes most highly prized in successful employees. Perhaps from the Industrial Revolution through the recent past, none was needed. In the 150 years of newspapers’ dominance in recruitment advertising, there is not one significant product innovation to speak of. Not one! And perhaps it’s because in the pre-21st century — the era of lifetime employment, ‘your paycheck is your thank you’, and limited labor mobility — the recruiting function did not demand it.

By the late 19th century, newspapers had settled on a recipe for fantastically profitable revenue contribution to their operations. The high-priced help-wanted ad maximized revenue while being sufficiently usable to its geographically-determined audience and clients. The absence of significant innovation over the century-and-a-half history of print classifieds may mean that the newspapers were taking their golden goose for granted, but it also indicates an absence of market need. In that sense, the symbiotic relationship between the establishment of help wanted ads and the evolution of the human resources department shows that the solution was good enough for 150 years.

But as with all evolved systems, the limitations also became important features. To understand why, we will look next at the ecosystem of recruiting in the 20th century.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under History of Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.