Home : Newsletters : 2002 : January
Consolidation in 2001
There were significant changes to the UK online recruitment market in 2001. Many brands, such as StepStone, ceased operating in the UK and others, such as Job Pilot, scaled down their UK operations. However this consolidation must be viewed as inevitable in what was a crowded and confusing market. A common complaint of HR professionals was that there were too many online recruitment options. Those seeking online partners at the beginning of 2002 are certainly presented with a simpler choice than they had at the start of 2001.
Which type of supplier is best in 2002?
DC recently predicted that the online recruitment market in Western Europe will be worth $4.5 billion by the year 2005 and that the combination of high internet adoption rates and a low unemployment rate in the UK would make the UK online recruitment market especially lucrative.
Prospects for the UK market seem healthy; one interesting question this raises is which type of supplier will be in the best position to take advantage of these predictions. There are two schools of thought; one that says suppliers should stick to their areas of expertise and remain niche and an alternative view that in order to be successful suppliers will need to increase their areas of expertise and offer recruiters a wide range of services.
This question is well illustrated by the increased interest in the backend technology sector in recent months. This was predicted by the IQPC Exchange / Enhance Media 2001 Benchmarking Study which identified the use of backend technologies, such as candidate management systems, as the most important issue facing online recruitment in the UK.
Some job boards are moving away from pure recruitment advertising models and adding a whole range of services to their portfolios, including candidate management systems and ASP services. The best example of this is Workthing’s acquisition of PeopleBank.
These new ‘diversified’ job boards aim to offer recruiters an ‘end to end’ recruitment solution, providing them with candidates, integrated recruitment areas of their corporate sites and candidate management systems to manage the recruitment process. This seems to be an attractive option for the recruiter and a prudent move for the job boards, however these companies will now not only be competing with other job boards but will now also be up against software and technology companies who specialize in the provision of candidate management systems.
The fundamental question here is whether this new breed of job board can successfully expand its services from selling advertising to providing holistic recruitment solutions. Technology companies argue that they can’t and that a recruiter seeking a candidate management system is best off dealing directly with a traditional technology specialist.
The truth is that only time will tell, we’ll have a much better idea at the end of the year if job boards can successfully make this transition from only providing candidates to providing the entire recruitment solution and whether ‘niche’ or ‘generalist’ suppliers will be in the best position in the UK online recruitment market.