History of Job Search, Recruitment Advertising in 2010

March 10, 2010 | (No Comments)

Recruitment advertising in the newspapers reached its peak in 2000, the year after Monster’s famous Super Bowl ad, garnering $8.7bn in revenues. Over the past decade, newspaper help-wanted ads have died a slow, steady death as those dollars have been whittled away by the rise of internet recruiting sites and the newspapers’ declining fortunes.

By last year (2009), help-wanted revenues had fallen to $0.8 bn, a drop of 92% in just under a decade – and steeper than the drops in any other form of classified ads. To add insult to injury, the combined U.S. revenues of the internet players – Monster, CareerBuilder, TheLadders, Dice, and HotJobs — surpassed the combined help-wanted revenues of all U.S. newspapers for the first time in 2009 as well.
While Monster’s commerical in 1999 set off the avalanche, it was 2009 that saw the newspapers swept away and buried under.
And this death of the newspapers is final. They aren’t coming back, and will never again be a force in recruitment advertising. After dominating the field for the past century-and-a-half, the newspaper has gone away.

And that’s a bit sad, because it didn’t have to be that way.

As VP, Business Development at HotJobs at the beginning of the last decade, my job was to meet up with all those newspapers — the incumbents in the field — and see which ones would be interested in working together with us to create our future and save theirs.
Almost inevitably, there would be the internet guy at newspaper company headquarters – smart, sophisticated, typically wearing black plastic frames and drinking a coffee brand that was cooler and more progressive than Starbucks. That we should work together was readily apparent to both of us, but the internet guy never had the political sway or smooth talk sufficient to get the publishers — the guys actually out in the field running the papers — to give up their high-margin help-wanted dollars today in order to build an internet help-wanted business for the future. It was the classic problem of “trading dollars for pennies” that has bedeviled all print publishers, forestalled any effective industry response, and became the even worse result of “losing dollars and getting nada.”

So the newspapers are gone and with the loss of the medium, recruitment advertising lost one of its most salient features: geography. The place-less-ness of the internet removed some of the barriers to bad behaviors that we’d taken for granted with the newspapers.

In the 20th century, when an employer placed a help wanted ad for a marketing manager in the Cincinnati Enquirer’s classified section, he or she could reasonably expect that the applicants would be… junior marketing people interested in marketing manager jobs and living in or around the Cincinnati area. With today’s job boards having national (and international) distribution, ads reach an audience far beyond the confines of the community or location in which the job is located. And, unintentionally, that generates an enormous number of applications from candidates who are geographically improbable, leading to a worse experience for recruiters and HR departments that use the internet services.

Yet the rise of the internet has also spurred an explosion in innovation in recruitment advertising. By some estimates, more than 40,000 job boards, along with dozens of variations in product, business model, and information distribution have come to life on the web. This past decade has seen more recruitment methodologies, businesses, and products than the prior century-and-a-half. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that any one year out of the past decade saw more innovation than the prior 150 years combined.

And that innovation is fed by, and feeds, an enormous consumer appetite for job information…
“How much does that job pay?”…
“What jobs are open right now?”…
“Who’s hiring?”….
“What could I do with my career?”…
“What’s going on in my industry?”….
“How could I earn more money in my profession?”…
“My neighbor does that job, does he make more than me?”…
…and so forth, are endlessly fascinating questions to the population at large.

Over the past decade, I’ve led Content & Community at HotJobs and launched TheLadders.com newsletter, and I can tell you, people have an insatiable appetite for this stuff.

At HotJobs, we built a 5 mm subscriber newsletter aimed at the general market in the space of 18 months.

And here at TheLadders, despite a double-opt-in process for consumers, and a screen on our side to ensure that every job, job-seeker and recruiter are suitable for our $100K+ site, we’ve grown our newsletter subscriber base to 3.6 mm people over six years with just 900,000 people ever unsubscribing. That reflects well on my colleagues and the excellent work they are doing, of course, but it also speaks to how enamored the audience is of the opportunity to learn more about jobs, careers, and earnings power. (And, yes, there is probably a bit of the voyeuristic element to it as well.)

But while the audience’s appetite is enormous, it is not blind or indiscriminate. And with so many innovative new approaches in the 21st century, that appetite is getting steadily more discerning.

The 21st century recruitment ad has the opportunity – the need, really -to be everything that the 20th century ad was not. In the 20th century, recruitment ads were crippled by the newspaper medium: the brevity, the stilted abbreviations, the emphasis on the most basic of facts.

The 21st century ad, by contrast, has been freed via the infinite space of the internet to blossom into so much more. In addition to communicating the facts of the job, the modern job ad has the chance to persuade and to sell, to step beyond the limits of dull, lifeless, bureaucratic boilerplate, and become an expression of the company culture, the personality of the workforce, and the benefits to the applicant of pursuing a career there.

That this marketing opportunity is wasted in the tens of millions of recruitment ads that are published in the United States each year is mind-boggling. Companies ignore the rapt attention that job-seekers spend consuming their recruitment advertising. This voluntary attention is dismissed, while those same job-seekers — who are also customers and business partners — are then the targets of advertising that is much more expensive and intrusive. What an enormous waste!

Today, virtually the only place that well-written, engaging recruitment advertising occurs is in the custom-crafted e-mails of charismatic, pro-active recruiters and HR people. The personal touch and the appeal to a candidate’s career prospects that a talented recruiting professional provides are both very effective and serve to pull a professional directly into the recruiting pipeline.

And while I applaud this personal skill, focusing the recruiting group’s entire sales & marketing strategy on “salesmanship” only, would be to miss a tremendous opportunity. As an industry, let’s not abdicate the brand messaging of our clients, in regards to their employment brand, to the daily whims of their employee base. Those that advocate a profusion of messaging – whether it be through social media, blogging, or an employee’s personal website – miss the mark as to what makes for good recruitment marketing. Though the sentiment is admirable, in a way, I can’t imagine, say, Coca-Cola, running their brand-marketing strategy in this manner — letting their bottlers, distributors and employees come up with whatever message they’d like to share with the public and then cheering the cacophony on.

Finally, the recruitment ad in 2010 has another problem – “where to go” and “how to get there”. The decline of the newspapers has meant the disappearance of distribution. Or, more precisely, the disappearance of the familiar means of distribution and the rise of a bewildering array of opportunities for getting a company’s recruitment advertising “out there”. Choosing among and between all these new formats — job boards, cost-per-click ads, banner ad networks, newsletter advertising, e-mail blasts, social media and a host of others — boggles the mind in the same way that the rise of Google ads and a slew of other innovations upended long-standing industry practice in consumer and business-to-business advertising and marketing.

As of yet, the recruiting function has not solved the challenge of these newfound responsibilities. Understanding the risks and the rewards for those engaged in recruiting will be the focus of my next post…