Jobs Classifieds: Crossing a Threshold?

It appears that something of a milestone has been reached (if the data are to be believed). According to this survey written up in MediaPost (reg. req’d), the Internet has become the primary hiring vehicle for employers. The research was sponsored by the DirectEmployers Association, "a non-profit consortium of over 200 U.S. employers and operator of the JobCentral.com employment search engine."

The survey reportedly found that the Internet was responsible for "51 percent of all hires in 2005, with the largest source of hires being the employers’ own corporate Web sites, while newspaper classified advertisements were the source of only 5 percent of the new hires."

Ouch: bad PR certainly for newspaper classifieds. The NAA forecast that 2006 would see $18.14 billion in print classified revenues in the US. Just like Yellow Pages, the revenue is offline, but the growth is clearly online.

Here’s how the survey broke down the distribution of online hiring sources:

• Corporate Employment Web Sites: 21 percent
• General Job Boards: 15 percent
• Niche Job Boards: 6 percent
• Social Network Web Sites: 5 percent
• Commercial Resume Databases: 4 percent

These categories are quite broad; I assume that CareeBuilder (owned by newspapers), Monster and HotJobs fall into the "general job boards" category. But it’s not clear. Sites like SimplyHired and Indeed, crawl corporate job boards (in addition to other sources) as does Yahoo!’s HotJobs. So there’s more complexity probably in the actual market than the survey reflects.

One must always be skeptical of sponsored research (which almost always has an agenda), but directionally at least these results are certainly accurate.

More and more print newspapers (a la the Tribune Co.) will need to start offering "free" classifieds (with upsell opportunities) in order to be competitive. If the perception in the marketplace is that newspaper classifieds no longer "work," (which we may be approaching), there will be a precipitous decline in print classified advertising.

It makes the issue of how newspapers respond to online trends, regarding classifieds in particular, quite urgent.

Classifieds seem to be on everyone’s minds these days. I just moderated a panel on classifeds and search and I’ll be at the NAA show later this month doing the same. And then again at the Editor & Publisher conference in May.