Recruitment ad directors face ongoing battle for success

Itís tough being a recruitment advertising director these days, whether you work for a newspaper or a dot-com (or both). Just when you thought your bruises would start to heal and hiring would pick up, it began to look like youíre going to get beat up again.



In simpler times, you might have had to fight occasionally for your share of ad dollars, but you understood the fight just made you smarter, tougher ñ better ñ at what you do. You might have undercut your competitorsí prices, if you had any competitors, but you never, ever, cut your prices so deep that you bled yourself to death. There were winners and losers but everybody fought by the same rules of engagement.

Those times are gone.

Thereís a new generation of competitors who arenít out to beat you ñ theyíre out to nullify you. They might not even consider themselves competitors. Theyíre not in the same business as you; they donít fight by your rules; they donít plan to make money the same way you do; theyíre after a different prize. They merely want what you have ñ recruitment listings ñ and theyíre willing to publish them for free. In doing so, theyíre commoditizing your products.

What Napster was to the recording industry, these guys are to you:

Theyíre free-ad Web sites like the popular and powerful Craigslist, which recently launched its 164th city worldwide. More free-ad sites spring up each month, including Fogster.com (San Francisco Bay area); Freecycle.org (free stuff); LiveDeal.com (run by a former EBay exec); Gumtree.com (Europe); Recycler.com (no job ads ñ yet; growing into multiple cities very quickly), and many others.

Theyíre the new-breed of ìmetasearchî engines ñ Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com and others ñ that scrape, trap and deep-link to your job boards and mingle those results with those from your competitors, plus company job listings that HR directors wouldnít pay to place on your site or in your newspaper.

And theyíre human resources executives themselves, who in a move to take control of their own distribution, won approval for a dot-jobs (.jobs) destination for company recruitment Web sites. Is that significant? If it makes it easier for search engines to index, or if it trains job-seekers to go directly to company Web sites ñ bypassing you ñ you bet it is.

How do you compete with free?

Service. And products. Your products must fit recruitersí needs; your Web sites must be a more satisfying consumer experience.

This is both the good news and the focus of the 2005 Classified Intelligence 2005 Recruitment Annual. In 142 pages, we look at the ìstate of the artî in recruitment advertising. This isnít a report about the job outlook, or about economic trends. Itís a report about how recruitment advertising is changing, and how media are working to get their share of the pie.

One key aspect: New products. Employers are using matching / qualifying / screening technology as a useful tool; some newspapers offer it as a service. HR directors donít need help reaching job candidates; they need help reaching the right candidates. Another successful product? Kiosks at sites where passive job-seekers may use them. More than a dozen newspapers offer these. They add revenue and reach new audiences. The report includes strategies, case studies, and a look at major technology vendors and what theyíre doing to help you meet recruitersí needs.

Putting the report together, we asked 17 human resources strategy-makers for their views on the industry and their prognoses for its future. Hereís a small sample of their comments:

ìItís silly to continue to post your openings and hope the right candidates respond, when you can build databases of candidates, select those that match your requirements, and recruitment them over a period of time through one-to-one relationship marketingî ñ Carol Blankenship, The David Group (a recruitment advertising agency).

ìOnline recruiting will continue to become more mainstream for all types of positions, including hourly / non-exempt, in all parts of the country, including smaller marketsî ñ Tom Mohr, Knight Ridder Digital.

ìNewspapers provide a tried-and-true approach. People still use the newspaper to look for a job, especially in the lower-end job categories. Newspapers must do a better job offering opportunities to employers to reach passive candidatesî ñ Nancy Lane, Suburban Newspapers of America.

The report also features details on ìpricing and packagingî of recruitment classified advertising at daily newspapers in the U.S., based on research by Classified Intelligence and Belden Associates. As weíve seen before, newspapers have a lot of work to do with their telephone teams ñ training, offering packaged products, presenting print and online more effectively, and selling rather than just taking orders.

Overall, our message is simple: Itís time for newspapers ñ and all paid-ad publishers ñ to get better, smarter, faster ñ or else.

Peter M. Zollman is founding principal of Classified Intelligence LLC and the AIM Group, , consulting groups that work with media companies to develop successful interactive media services. The Classified Intelligence 2005 Recruitment Annual is available through ClassifiedIntelligence.com. Zollman can be reached at pzollman@classifiedintelligence.com, (407) 788-2780.