Slow Road To Recovery, Check4Jobs Boss Shares His Thoughts

Alex Paterson founder of Check4Jobs.com the job search and employment news website talks about how the recession has bitten his industry hard (online recruitment) and how he sees things shaping up in the second half of 2009.

Some of you who follow news on the various sites that are specific to our industry (online job search) will have noticed that I have not written any articles or press releases for the best part of 3 months. There is good reason for this, we have had a very hard fight with the current economic climate and I have found myself concentrating very hard on core issues such as customer service and making sure our clients and users are getting everything they require from us as a website and a business. Having day to day contact with job boards has given me a lot of insight into just how hard the first 6 months of 2009 has been for everyone in our industry. I have always passed on the fact that this is not a recession for individuals but a recession for us all and i have done my best to keep everyone thinking positive by knowing they are not alone.

As the second half of year starts to come in I have to admit that things are still far from popping champagne and booking exotic holidays but there IS definitely some small sign that perhaps we have seen the worst and things are slowly (very slowly) starting to build up. For example the FTSE 100 has risen 23 percent since the all-time low hit in March 2009 albeit things have been up and down and it is now struggling to get above 4500 again. But it will, and least we forget the summer holidays has always been slow for both stock markets and the job industry due to people going away and businesses slowing down on key projects due to senior staff being away. From what I am hearing from some of the big players out there and more niche job sites, business (sales) has started to grow for the first time this year, and that is something i can agree with as the Check4Jobs.com job index has seen a very slight rise in posted jobs in the month of June and it looks set to continue in July.

To me a good positive sign that we are recovering is the launch of new job boards. I know this is not music to every ones years but it is a sign that banks are getting some confidence back and are lending again, and of course when entrepreneur's start to open their own business they usually want to show people how well they are doing and buy a new car and in some cases a new house, which of course is exactly what the UK needs to happen.

In the last 6 weeks we have had 10 NEW job boards come to us looking at what we can offer them in terms of traffic and CVs and previous to that I can honestly say we didn't have new account enquiry since late 2008. I spoke to one of these new clients this week and they asked me if there was anything we could do to help them increase their performance without increasing their costs. This is a good honest approach and I liked the idea that we as a responsible job search engine can forge such strong partnerships that will see us in good stead in the future and that is a message i would like to pass along. If you CAN help someone then why not do it? Have a think on that one and maybe by working together things will start getting better for us all.

Article By Alex Paterson who is the Website Director at www.Check4Jobs.com