Recruitment Websites Will Cut Into Classified Revenues
Recruitment advertising revenue represented 26.1% of the £1.8bn spent on classified ads in the regional press during 2000 (Advertising Association Yearbook). With over 50% of UK residents now in the online habit (Office of National Statistics), increasing numbers of online recruitment sites are poised to claim a cut of this revenue.
Several of the UK’s web recruitment sites are fairly established, on the internet’s timescale. GoJobsite.co.uk claims to be the oldest, having launched in 1995 as Jobsite. Other well-visited sites Topjobs.co.uk and Stepstone.co.uk launched the following year, while Monster.co.uk (1999), Workthing.com (2000) and Fish4Jobs.co.uk (2000) are more recent additions, and have employed heavy cross-media advertising including TV treatments to establish their names.
Two of the major names, Fish4Jobs and Workthing are actually owned by press outfits. The Fish4 sites draw together advertising placed in local press owned by Newsquest, Northcliffe News, Trinity Mirror, GMG and RIM, while Workthing is owned and run by GMG, which means, for example, that its media pages are provided in association with the Media Guardian. Other sites in this market allow advertisers ranging from individual organisations to recruitment agencies to place time-limited advertising in a similar way to traditional classified ads.
Typically, sites advertise 20-25,000 opportunities at a given time. Most also offer a variety of careers advice and personalised search options. Searching for a job as an accountant in Manchester produced varied results. Monster, Workthing and GoJobsite all came up with a dozen or more possibilities, while Fish4Jobs only managed 6, the others less.
According to NetValue, usage of these sites is evenly divided between the typical working age groups, without the bias towards younger age groups seen in some net usage figures. However, 60% of visitors are men. The split of usage by profession reflects the broad range of occupations these multi-sector sites cover. Non-manual workers below management level made up 15.5% of visitors in October, while professionals made up 14.2%. Students were the largest single group, making up 23.2% of visitors.