New research suggests that traditional classified advertising is losing out to online recruitment sites with a huge number of people looking to the internet to find employment.
According to
eMarketer, a recent survey which polled more than 36,000 residents of the European Union, Iceland and Norway, including both internet users and non-users, found that 30.2% of internet users had gone online to find a job. This was an increase from the 28.3% who looked online in June 2001. Swedish job seekers made the most use of online job sites with 40.1% of Sweden’s net users looking online for work.
Additionally, NetValue has measured a rise in visits to online recruitment sites in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea in December and January of this year. Seasonal employment patterns helped traffic increase by over 100,000 visitors in both Hong Kong and Korea in the period from December 2001 to January 2002.
During the global decline in the advertising market over the past year, recruitment advertising has fallen off, along with most other sectors, as lay-offs and recruitment freezes became prevalent. Many local and national newspaper groups have suffered significant losses as a result of the decline in recruitment advertising and are banking on recouping some of this revenue as the employment market picks up. It may be that the boom in popularity of online recruitment denies newspapers some of this revenue as advertisers chose instead to exploit the convenience and reach of the net instead.
A recent report by Net Value (see Recruitment Websites Will Cut Into Classified Revenues) highlighted the boom in online job seeking in the UK and warned of the possible loss to the classified market as a result.
