Home : Newsletters : 2002 : July
The Media Monitoring Service (MMS) measures recruitment advertising in print publications. MMS records the size of the advertisements (in column centimetres), the vacancy job title, the advertiser, the qualifications that the job requires and other vacancy details. MMS data is used to determine market share amongst print titles and is an important element in the offline advertising decision making process. Not every print publication is covered by MMS, however it does include all national press, key trade press titles and a comprehensive range of regional publications.
In addition to being used to calculate market share information, MMS also provides valuable information about the recruitment market as a whole and is useful when trying to identify trends.
The total number of jobs advertised in press monitored by MMS in the last 12 months was 1,409,042; compared to 1,618,413 in the 12 months prior to that – a decrease of 13%.
The private sector particularly suffered, with the number of vacancies decreasing from 1,162,826 to 892,800 – a fall of 23%.
The number of job advertised by public sector employers in the last 12 months increased to 516,242 from 455,587 in the previous time period – an increase of 13%.
As yet there is no equivalent measurement system for online media. Online recruitment does not have the same common measurements as print media; there is no equivalent to column centimetres. Added to this different job boards host vacancies for different periods of time – making direct comparisons difficult.
MMS shows there has been a downturn in the print recruitment advertising market, but an interesting question is how much of the decrease in the number of vacancies advertised in print is due to a downturn in the market and how much is due to a migration of recruitment advertising from print to online media? Three years ago Forrester Research predicted that by 2005 20% of all recruitment advertising in the UK would be placed online and that by the end of this year approximately 12% of all recruitment advertising would be online.
The best current estimate of the number of jobs being advertised online comes from www.alljobsuk.com who have been logging the number of vacancies advertised on the ‘top ten’ recruitment sites for the last two years.
AllJobsUK have not attempted to analyse the data in any detail or conduct any like for like comparison across sites monitored – but the figures are still revealing. The number of jobs advertised on the top ten online recruitment sites in the last 12 months has fallen to 330,333 from 533,291 in the previous 12 months, a decrease of 39%. Again this data raises more questions; it is possible that as only the major sites are monitored the apparent decrease in vacancies advertised online could actually be a migration of online vacancies from major generic job boards to smaller more specific sites.
It appears from the data that’s available that online recruitment has suffered more than offline recruitment in the last 12 months. If this were true then it could be for a variety of reasons. Firstly when recruitment budgets are being cut advertisers might rely on tried and tested media such as favourite recruitment publications rather than experiment with new media. Additionally some of the recruitment sectors that are the most suitable for online recruitment, such as IT, telecommunications and new media, have been those that have suffered most in the last year.
By adding the number of print jobs monitored by MMS and the number of online vacancies recorded by AllJobsUK we get a total of 1,739,375 vacancies advertised in the last 12 months; of which 19% were posted online. Due to differences in the two measuring methodologies and likely vacancy duplication it is doubtful whether this figure is entirely accurate. However it could still be worth keeping an eye on this figure over time as it could prove to be a useful indicator of the rate of migration of offline to online recruitment advertising.