Newspapers are in danger of losing the recruitment market for good. Steve Outing does a good job of interviewing researchers who have looked at this market, laying out the issues, and suggesting strategies.
Clearly, the quality of current offerings, including those from market leader Monster.com, is poor. And CareerBuilder hasn’t delivered the quality and business opportunities that newspapers need.
In the housing slump of of the eighties, the San Jose Mercury News lost a lot of real estate classifieds, just as you’d expect. But in the housing boom of the nineties, that advertising didn’t return. The advertisers had found more efficient and less expensive ways to sell houses. When the Bush recession is over, I doubt that newspapers will ever see recruitment classified linage return to their peak levels. Their big advertisers were already weary of the treatment they were getting when the Web became an option.
Unless newspapers can deconstruct the recruitment classified business, all that will be left of the recruitment advertising business will be ads for telemarketing jobs and work-at-home schemes.